WEB HOSTING PROVIDER ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW WHEN CHANGING OR DICIDING ON WHAT WEB HOSTING PROVIDER TO CHOOSE

What should you know about changing your web hosting provider and making the final move? This is a dilemma that website owners often face as their site becomes popular and the host you have been working with from the beginning doesn’t provide enough bandwidth and storage to handle all the extra action. This is especially the case if you began using a free web host.

Once you have decided to make the move, plan ahead. First, do your research and try to find a new hosting company that will fulfill your needs for years to come.

When you find that perfect host, you will have to prepare to move the entire site to a new server. Before this goes through, however, remember that you have to back up the old website from the old host to avoid any unnecessary problems.

Making a big move from one provider to the next is also a good time to reevaluate the efficacy of your site in general. If it isn’t well-structured and has been growing like a weed, you may want to commission a redesign. This may involve a new page design or changing your database and content storage.

After you move to the new host, for the first 48 hours it’s recommended to place a redirect page on your old site that forwards visitors to the new location automatically. This way, no one will get lost or confused after you make the move, even before the IP address has propagated.

Take note that it takes about 48 hours for a new website to get listed on domain servers all over the Internet, but after this period of time everything should run smoothly.

You may also want to find out if your new host runs on Unix or Windows so that compatibility won’t become a problem. You don’t want everything coming from the old host to be incompatible with the new one.

Before signing up for a certain amount of space and bandwidth, make sure the new host provided an adequate amount – you don’t want to make a move again anytime soon, so this is a crucial step.

Research the services offered by your new host and make sure everything you’re used to is also available with the new provider. If you need autoresponders and mail forwarding, for example, make sure the new provider offers these services.

As your site continues to grow and becomes busier, you may want to sign up with a host that offers more bandwidth down the line. Find out what their policy is for extra bandwidth.

If you are hosted on a shared server, make sure no adult sites are also being hosted on the same server. As these sites become very busy, you don’t want to have them slow down traffic to your site.

Research the web hosting provider by reading review sites and forums for customer feedback. This should give you a good indication of the type of service you will receive from the company. One good company is SiteSell – they offer good hosting services that go above and beyond the basics.