How to Transfer Your Web Site to a New Web Hosting Service?


There are various reasons why an online business owner like you has decided to switch to a new web hosting providers. Your old web hosting provider probably has very poor technical support, or their web server is always down, or may be your old web hosting provider cannot meet your hosting requirements anymore or you could have discovered a cheaper web hosting service?and etc. Regardless of the reasons, now you have found a new web hosting service and you need to transfer your website from your current web host to the new web host. Below is the step-by-step guide that you can follow in order to achieve a painless and error free of moving to a new web hosting provider.

Transfer Schedule
Ideally, you should plan the transfer one month before you terminate your old web hosting plan in order to have sufficient time to perform a smooth transfer. Doing the transfer in less than one month time frame will put your website in risk of inaccessible.

New web hosting service registration
Now, sign-up your new web hosting service once you have decided the termination date mentioned above. Depending on your new web hosting provider, your new web hosting account usually will be set up within 24 hours.

Files Backup
While waiting for your new web hosting account to be created, it is time to backup all your web files on the old web hosting provider. In most cases, you already have all the files of your website on your local computer. However, it is still a good idea to backup all your files from the old web server. In addition to the normal HTML files, you may need to backup any script files, databases files, and even server logs files if it is necessary. You should create a directory structure that is similar to the directory structure on your web server and download the files into the respective directory.

Files uploading
Once you are notified that your new web hosting account has been created, you will receive a notification email from your new web hosting provider. In that email, it contains all the information required to set up website, this including the FTP server information. With that FTP information, you can now FTP to your new web hosting server and upload all your files. You should start by first creating the directory structures on the web server, and then upload all the files to the respective directory.

It is the time to install any script files or databases if there are used in your website. Likewise, it is a good time to set up all the email accounts through the administration panel.

Once you have finished uploading all the files and installed the script files or databases, you can now use the temporary URL to test your site. The temporary URL can be found in the notification email from your new web hosting provider. The temporary URL could be in the following format:http://viola.lunarpages.com/~your-webaccountname

TestingUsing the temporary URL directory, you can now test your web site online. Due to the fact that different web hosting server may require different server environment to execute. Therefore, you need to verify all the scripts (such as CGI, Perl) are working accordingly. In addition, you should test all the hyperlinks in the normal web pages if possible to ensure no broken links. While you are testing through the temporary URL directory, your website hosted on the old web hosting provider is continue operating.

Transfer domain name
Once you have finished testing your new website on the temporary URL and verified it is working perfectly. The next step is to contact your current domain name registrar (i.e. the company where you register your domain name) to change the old DNS (Domain Name Server) to point to the new DNS of your new web hosting provider. Usually, the DNS information is sent to you through email after you register successful with the new web hosting provider. Alternatively, you will be able to find the DNS information from the website of your new hosting provider.

Domain name servers control how a domain name is resolved. Typically, the domain name servers are in following format:

NS1.YOUR-NEW-WEB-HOSTING.COM

NS2.YOUR-NEW-WEB-HOSTING.COM

Some domain name registrar requires the IP addresses of the DNS. In this case you have to provide the IP addresses of your new DNS. For example:

NS1: 216.193.194.212

NS2: 216.193.207.106

Typically, it will take about 24-72 hours to get the DNS record to change and propagate through all the WHOIS servers. You can use Whois tools on the Internet such as whois.com to monitor the status of the DNS transfer. Once the transfer is completed, you will notice the change to your new DNS. Alternatively, you can make a minor modification to your home page (for example, adding a new image or symbol) and upload to the new web hosting server. When you access your home page through the normal domain name (www.your-website.com) and you notice the new home page, then you are sure that the DNS has been transferred successfully.

Final Testing
Now, your website on the new web hosting provider is officially transferred and online. You should repeat all the tests to ensure it is fully functional. Once you are confirmed the new website is working correctly, you can go ahead to terminate your old web hosting account.

A Beginners Guide to Web Hosting

What is web hosting? Whenever you visit a website, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers so that online users can visit your website.

Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.

A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For example, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000 websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to 'store' the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called 'data center'. In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.

What are the different types of web hosting?There are different kinds of web hosting companies out there with different characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized into the following categories:

Shared Hosting

In shared hosting (also known as virtual web hosting), many websites are sharing the space on the same physical web servers. Depending on the web host, a physical web server can hosts a few hundred to even thousand of different websites at one time. You may wonder if a physical web server is shared by so many websites, will the performance of the web server deteriorate? In fact, web servers are usually equipped with high-end powerful computer, therefore it can support up to a certain number of websites without any problem. But when the web server is overloaded and exceeded the reasonable number of websites that it can support, then you will begin to experience a slower response from the web server.

However, a reputable and experience web hosting provider will constantly monitor the performance of the web server and will add new web servers when deem necessary without sacrificing the benefits of the website owners. Since a physical web server is shared (diskspace, computer processing power, bandwidth, memory) by many websites, the web hosting provider can therefore afford to offer a lower hosting price. For the same reason, websites on the shared hosting would have to accept slower server response time. Typically, shared hosting plans start at $5 - $20 per month.

Dedicated Hosting

In contrast to shared hosting, dedicated hosting assigned a specific web server to be used only by one customer. Since a dedicated web server is allocated to only a single customer, the customer has the option to host single/multiple web sites, modify the software configuration, handle greater site traffic and scale the bandwidth as necessary. Therefore, dedicated hosting commands a higher premium and typically starts at $50 per month and can range up to $200 - $500 per month. As a result, dedicated hosting is regularly used by high traffic and extremely important website.

Co-location hosting

In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to the web hosting providers and customers only rent the web server during the hosting period. While in co-location hosting, the customer owns the web server hardware and only housed their web server within the web hosting provider's secure data center. In this way, the customer has full control over their web server and simultaneously benefit from the 24/7 server monitoring and maintenance provided by the secure data center. Depending on the monthly bandwidth and rack space required, typically co-location hosting range from $500 - $1000 per month.

Reseller hosting

In reseller hosting, a web hosting provider offers web server storage to third-party (i.e. reseller) at a discount price, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Typically, resellers are web consultants including web designers, web developers, or system integration company who resell the web hosting as a add-on service to complement their other range of services. Commonly, resellers can receive up to 50 percent discount on the price of a hosting account from the web hosting provider. And resellers are allowed to decide its own pricing structure and even establish its own branding (in other words, reseller setup its web hosting company on the Internet and start selling web hosting plans under its brand).

To the reseller's customers, the reseller is the web host provider. In cases when technical problems such as server down and access problem arise, the resellers will have to correspond directly with the actual web host provider. Due to the communication process taken place between customer to reseller and from reseller to actual web host provider and back and forth, undoubtedly problems will take longer time to resolve. Unless you are running your own personal website or non-profit website and willing to take the risks of poor support from the reseller, reseller hosting is generally not a good option.

However, the web hosting market today is filled with resellers that sell lowest price web hosting plans. So, how do you tell between a genuine web hosting provider from a reseller? You don't judge by the availability of toll-free number alone because some web hosting providers even offer their resellers with their own toll-free number for co-branded technical support. When the reseller's customer calls the number for technical support, the web host uses the reseller's name so the customer thinks that the support is coming from the reseller directly. Likewise, don't be fooled by the professional designed website alone because it is extremely easy to create a professional looked business website nowadays.

In general, resellers can be distinguished from their hosting price and company information. In most cases, a genuine web hosting provider has solid company information such as iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial background, offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers usually do not have solid company background (here is just an example out of thousands out there). Moreover, the hosting price by resellers is generally below $5 per month. So, why settle for resellers when you can find genuine web hosting providers offering superb quality web hosting at the hosting price ranging between $7 - $10.

Therefore, you should not strive to find the cheap web hosting companies without first considering the quality of the service and support provided. Don't expect to find any top-level support if you choose to pay only $2 or $3 per months for your web hosting plan. On the other hand, by paying just slightly more for your hosting plan, you can now discover a list of low cost yet high quality web hosting plans to host your important website.

Choosing a Quality Web Host
If you are anything like me, you'd probably like to have a website on the Internet but you just have no idea how to go about it. All this talk of web hosting, bandwidth, disc space, and other jargon can cause one to say, "This is too complicated and technical, I just wanted to have a place to put all of my favorite skateboarding photos, cool information on ramp designs, and the best places to skate!" To get a website on the Web you have to go through a web host. The question is how do you find the web host for you? If you type 'web host' into your search engine like Google you will get thousands of sites. Hit on one of these and like any product on the market you will see all sorts of persuasive propaganda to incite you to use their company; that is if you can decipher any of the technical jargon that only computer-heads can comprehend. Some web hosts offer free business cards with an account; some probably offer free watches?like all consumer industries you the buyer must beware. I'm a writer so I'll use the analogy of a writer's journal. The journal I like must not be too big or small in book size. It also must have a good amount of space allocated to each day, again not a whole page but not just a few lines. Of course I also want it to be cheap but of a good quality that won't fall apart while I'm using it, and I hope it would last for posterity. I just want the diary, some nice pictures in it are O.K. but unnecessary especially if it adds to the price. It's the same with a web host and web site scenario. You want to get the right deal for you, enough space and enough access to the public that you wish to associate with. As a novice who doesn't understand all the jargon this can pose a problem. Are you an individual, small business, blog, or a big time corporation? What do you need and how do you get it? As far as I can tell the web hosting business is a lot like the fast food business. The big corporations have strict guidelines, will offer you special deals, and have monthly 'cheeseburger specials'. But, I've always been more interested in the 'Mom and Pop' small time diners who have that real caring human approach. You know you are a customer and a person, not just a number on a sales receipt. I believe the hosting companies are the same. A smaller hosting company will probably treat its users with more honest integrity as well as having more flexibility in dealing with your individual situation. They can often tailor web site packages to accommodate exactly what you are looking for as well as the ability to update them quickly when your needs change. My advice is to contact a few of the smaller companies. Look for ones with good reputations or just arbitrarily email them and compare results from different places. Which one do you feel most comfortable with? Go for it; ask as many questions as you can, see how the different hosts differ in their answers. Try one; if it doesn't work out try another, it's really easy to move around. Don't be afraid, you've got nothing to lose except the fear itself!

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to provide their own websites accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Webhosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center, called colocation

Internet hosting services can run Web servers; see Internet hosting services.

Hosting services limited to the Web:

Free web hosting service:
is free, (sometimes) advertisement-supported web hosting, and is sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.

Shared web hosting service:
one's Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU.

Reseller web hosting:
allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a provider.

Virtual Dedicated Server:
slicing up a server into virtual servers. each user feels like they're on their own dedicated server, but they're actually sharing a server with many other users.


Dedicated hosting service:
the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server.

Colocation web hosting service:
similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server.


Clustered hosting:
having multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Wikipedia's own servers are a good example of this.