Moving Hosting Without Headaches?

Image via Wikipedia

A lot of the questions we get asked on a regular basis are about moving your hosting without downtime and without too many headaches.

If you leave switching provider until the last minute it will be painful, so please don’t!

We’d recommend people to look into changing their hosting provider BEFORE their current hosting subscription expires.

We’ve got a couple of simple articles on our site to help guide you through the process:

Guide to Moving Hosting Provider

and of course a

Transferring Domains

If you follow the steps outlined by us you shouldn’t have too many headaches.

However, there are a few things that people need to take into account.

• Email – make sure you download it from your previous provider
• Email accounts – make sure you set them up on our servers. There is no way for us to know which email accounts you were using with another provider.
• Website content – make sure you have a recent backup from your previous provider.
• Databases – If your site uses databases (MySQL or others) the connection strings / parameters will need to be changed and updated to reflect the settings on our servers. You’ll also need to ensure that you have a recent backup of any databases you were using.

Our technical support team are more than happy to help people, but they cannot and will not perform miracles!

Regarding domain names – if the domain has already expired you CANNOT transfer it. You will need to renew it with the previous provider (the exception to this being .ie domains).