Moving Your Site to a New Hosting Company
Moving a site from one hosting company (like Godaddy) to another (like Siteground) isn’t as hard as it might seem. This is a common and easy task for experienced web developers.
The Process Summary
- Confirming Domain Location / Registration and Access
- Double-checking Email
- Buying New Hosting
- Moving the Site
- Switching the Domain to go to the new Hosting
The whole process should only take about an hour for smaller websites. Without any changes to the email, this is a fairly simple process.
1) Confirming Domain Location / Registration and Access
The first step is confirming the location and access to the domain. The domain controls where your website resides, so when we change hosting, we’ll need to adjust at least an “A Record” in the DNS Settings.
2) Double-checking Email
Moving email is quite a bit more complicated than moving hosting, but thankfully most emails are already separated from hosting. If your email is already running through Google or Microsoft, you won’t need to worry about changing any email settings during this process.
3) Buying New Hosting
The third step is to buy the hosting at the new company. At the time of this writing, I recommend Siteground’s “Grow Big” Hosting for most small to medium size businesses.
4) Moving the Site
The moving of the site includes moving the files and the database from the old hosting to the new hosting. This is done completely by the developer. Before the next step, this is double-checked to make sure everything moved over well, and is working.
5) Switching the Domain to go to the new Hosting
The final step is done by the developer as well. The DNS settings (the login from step 1) will be adjusted to point to the new hosting. A successful site move should have virtually no downtime for the website.
