Many reasons can convince someone to transfer their website to a new web hoster. Here are the most frequent ones I hear:
- Price augmentations
- Mediocre customer service
- Bad website support.
For those who aren’t in our domain, changing web hosters can be a huge challenge. However, with a quick call, our experts will reassure you. You will only see the benefits of moving.
When considering a change in hosting services, we must think of every detail related to your hosting plan. Your site of course, but also your emails, your DNS zone and all other services that are connected to it (like a PBX server for example).
It’s a delicate task to undertake, even for those who are accustomed like me! A simple mistake during the migration could cause a devastating loss of data. Therefore, we have established a strict protocol for website transfers. We make verifications before, during and after the transfer to be sure everything works without any bumps.
With our knowledge, your site and emails will remain functional during the entire transfer to prevent it from affecting your clients’ experience.
In order to make you more comfortable to the idea of moving your hosting plan, I will share with you the major steps we take during a site transfer.
The backup plan and the preparation of your hosting
We should never assume that everything will go well, we must follow by the book the saying “Better safe than sorry”! That is why my golden rule will always remain the one of prevention.
Before any modification, we always, and without exception, generate a full backup of your previous hosting. In this case, if the worst were to happen, we would have access to all of your data, and it could easily be restored.
When we move a site on the web, there is always a certain delay before the whole planet is aware, this is what we call propagation. To reduce this delay to the maximum, 24 hours before moving your hosting plan, we will modify your DNS zone and reduce this delay to 5 minutes. This change reduces almost completely the chance of losing emails or clients.
Moving day
No need to be stressed during the transfer. We take care of packing, transporting and unpacking your hosting in its new home.
Wherever your site is currently hosted, we will use all the necessary means to transfer you rapidly and safely. Here are some of the tools that we wear around our belts to help us proceed with the transfer:
- Creation tools and tailored backup restoration.
- Manual database exporter for many versions of PHP.
- Transfer tools for IMAP email accounts.
- And many more.
Our team and I have made thousands of websites transfers up to now and are confident in our abilities to transfer yours. We will know without a problem which tool is best for the job.
Quality control
We wouldn’t be able to qualify ourselves as experts if we skip this crucial step!
Before we finalise the change, we will make sur that your site is functional on our servers. To do so, we modify the configuration of our computer so that it believes the site on our server is the one currently active on the web. In our slang, we say that we will modify our « hosts » file.
This modification allows us to compare the site restored on our server with the one in your old web hosting. If any modification is needed, we will do so to keep this transfer completely transparent. Needless to say, you will be advised of any necessary change.
We won’t stop there! We will also permit ourselves to make your website even faster with our extension WSA, developed in our offices by Astral Internet’s team, in order to provide an even better performance for your site.
The grand finale
At this stage, we will make sure that the entire planet can see your website from its new home. Of course, we will only proceed once we can guarantee 110% functionality.
To do so, we will continue in two steps:
- We will firstly modify the current DNS zone. Since we took care of correcting the delay for the propagation during the preparation, we will only need about 5 minutes until your site and emails point on our servers.
- We will alter the nameservers (a.k.a NS). The propagation of this change is the longest of all, taking up to 48 hours before being completed. But since we already modified the DNS zone, we don’t need to worry about this delay.
Please note that it is crucial to maintain your old hosting plan active during the transfer. Without this, your site could temporarily go down. I believe you will agree with me that our work should remain completely invisible to your clients.
It’s finally time to burn the bridge between your old web host!
Finally, done with expensive, unstable and complicated hosting plans!
Once we confirm that everything is working perfectly, it will be time to cut ties with your previous hosting company and enjoy fully your freedom with Astral Internet!
In most cases, you can easily do so by sending them an email or through your online client space.
That’s it already!
With a team like ours to support you, the transfer of your hosting plan won’t be very complex.
As soon as it’s done, you will have access to a brand-new control panel. It will give you the possibility to bring all the modifications you desire.
You will probably have a few questions in the beginning, but don’t forget that it is always possible to contact me for your questions.
To add the cherry on top, you could also consider transferring your domains with us; for the sake of simplifying your life.
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