Migrating Your Domain to a New Web Host

Web host migra­tion is like sky­div­ing: you know there’ll be a lot of adren­a­lin, and you hope there won’t be a loud thud at the end.

I’ve migrated a few domains recently for myself and oth­ers. So far, no thuds. Here’s the process I used.

The fol­low­ing assumes (1) you already have a web­site hosted some­where and (2) you want to move it to a new web host, keep­ing the same domain name. (You’ll prob­a­bly find this guide help­ful even if one of those two assump­tions is wrong.)

The Sce­nario

So. Let’s say you’re going to move your nonprofit’s website:

• Domain name: peace-n-hope.org
• Old web host: evil-R-us.com
• New web host: HopeSpringsEternal.net

Overview

1. Pick a good web host.
2. Sign up for an account.
3. Set up the new web host.
4. Pre­pare the new host to receive email.
5. Change your domain to point at the new web host.
6. Watch for the change to happen.
7. Do some final test­ing and tweaking.
8. Kick back and bask in your geekiness.

Impor­tant Back­ground: Domain Name Servers

Com­put­ers on the Inter­net don’t refer to each other by name. They refer to each other by their Inter­net Pro­to­col (IP) addresses. The most com­mon inter­net addresses look like four num­bers sep­a­rated by peri­ods. For exam­ple, your cur­rent IP address is 38.107.191.108. (I’m not mak­ing that up; I just checked.)

When you enter www.peace-n-hope.org in your browser’s address bar, or when you send an email to i…@peace-n-hope.org, some­how that human-friendly domain name has to get con­verted into a computer-friendly IP address.

The gad­get that han­dles the con­ver­sion is called a Domain Name Server (DNS). It sits on a com­puter some­where out in the Inter­net, and it has an enor­mous table of entries say­ing “requests for domain name X should be routed to IP Address Y”. At most recent count there were just over 2.3 gajil­lion domain name servers scat­tered around the Internet.

Some DNSs are cooler (more author­i­ta­tive) for cer­tain things that oth­ers, but let’s not get into that right now. For now all you need to know is that when any­one uses a domain name for any­thing, there’s a DNS some­where that decides which com­puter that request should get routed to.

So to start with you have one web host, and all of the DNSs in the Inter­net point at it. Your world looks like this:

Pick a Good Web Host

A good host makes all the dif­fer­ent if migra­tion turns ugly. There’s a good chance you’ll hit some glitch or another: prob­a­bly minor, and pos­si­bly your fault. Maybe you can fig­ure it out your­self, but a good host might fig­ure it out it faster. And often you’ll need the host’s help to actu­ally fix it.

I recently offered sta­tis­tics to help you choose a web host. You can use my num­bers or research on your own, but look before you sign up for an account.

Infor­ma­tion you need

Your new host, HopeSpringsEternal.net, should have given you the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion. If not, ask for it:

• The loca­tion of a web page (often called a “con­trol panel” page) where you can man­age things like email accounts, file access, etc.
• Login infor­ma­tion for the con­trol panel
• Infor­ma­tion on trans­fer­ring files to/from the site using File Trans­fer Pro­to­col (FTP)
• The addresses of the new host’s DNSs

Limbo: Set Up The New Web Host

Once you’ve cre­ated an account with HopeSpringsEternal.net you have two hosts:

1. Your active host, evil-R-us.com, which every­one is using for peace-n-hope.org’s email and web­site, and
2. Your dor­mant host, HopeSpringsEternal.net, which no one knows about but you.

For the next steps you’ll need some way to move infor­ma­tion from your cur­rent evil-R-us.com host and to your new HopeSpringsEternal.net host. FTP is the most widely avail­able way to do this is through. When you signed up for an account, HopeSpringsEternal.net should have pro­vide you with infor­ma­tion on con­nect­ing to your account via FTP.

If you don’t have this infor­ma­tion for your old or new web hosts, you’ll need to con­tact them to get it.

Some hosts offer other file trans­fer meth­ods. In the worst case you can down­load your cur­rent web­site by using a web copier pro­gram, or (ugh) by vis­it­ing every page through your web browser and doing a “Save As” to save the page on your local hard drive. But only do this if there’s no other way around it.

1. Back up your site.

Down­load all of your con­tent from your cur­rent web host. You should make a backup on your local com­puter plus addi­tional copies just in case—to CDs and/or DVDs and/or a sec­ondary hard-drive and/or an online back up service.

Be sure to get all of the con­tent from your site, for example:

1. Web pages;
2. Log files;
3. Other files from your site that you’d like to keep;
4. The con­tents of any data­bases; for exam­ple, if you use a blog­ging tool or a Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (CMS) fol­low the tool’s backup instructions;
5. Maybe other stuff: poke around thor­oughly in your cur­rent account to see what’s there

2. Upload your site to your new host

Remem­ber every­thing you did in step 1? Now do it backwards.

Upload the files to your new web host, prob­a­bly using FTP, and set up and restore data­bases as needed.

If your upload will over­write exist­ing files on the new host, down­load copies of those files and save them some­where safe just in case. You’re prob­a­bly not over­writ­ing any­thing crit­i­cal, but if so you’ll want to be able to revert.

If you’re using a CMS or another database-based appli­ca­tion, you’ll need to either cre­ate login accounts for the data­base, or update your con­fig­u­ra­tion files to use the new logins cre­ated by your new host.

3. Test

Prob­lem: nobody knows about your HopeSpringsEternal.net account but you. Not only does that mean the world is still vis­it­ing your cur­rent (awful) evil-R-us.com web host, but you can’t test your new site sim­ply by vis­it­ing http://peace-n-hope.org: doing that will just take you to the web­site files stored on evil-R-us.com. In other words, your world looks like this:

Since you can’t pre­view your site using your usual domain name, HopeSpringsEternal.net should have given you an ugly-but-functional URL you can visit to test your web­site on the dor­mant host. For exam­ple, this might look some­thing like www.HopeSpringsEternal.net/~peace-1/www. You can visit this URL to con­firm your web­site looks good before you make the big leap and tell every­one else about it.

Test your entire site, and spend spe­cial time test­ing any­thing tricky: for exam­ple, a part of your site that reads from or writes to a data­base, or that col­lects infor­ma­tion through a web form, or that sends email. You could run a pro­gram that checks whether every link is bro­ken, but you’ll be safer (and prob­a­bly feel bet­ter) if you man­u­ally click every link in the site, assum­ing that’s practical.

You might have trou­ble test­ing some sim­ple parts of the site (like hyper­links) or more com­pli­cated parts (like entry forms) if they redi­rect you to your cur­rent domain name: right now any­thing that takes you to peace-n-hope.org will take you to your current/old host, since the Inter­net doesn’t know yet that peace-n-hope.org has any­thing to do with your new host HopeSpringsEternal.net. Take this catch into account when you’re testing.

4. Leave a Trace

Make some small change to your web­site and upload it to your new host, but not to your old host. That way you’ll be able to tell when your new host becomes the active host: as soon as you browse to your web­site and see the small unique change, you’ll know you’re look­ing at the files on your new host.

Email Springs Eter­nal: Prep­ping the New Host

Besides upload­ing your web­site files to your new host, you need to pre­pare it to receive peace-n-hope.org’s email.

Just as with web traf­fic, right now any­one send­ing an email to anyt…@peace-n-hope.org is send­ing it to your old web host, evil-R-us.com. Again, that’s because all of the world’s Domain Name Servers only know about evil-R-us.com, and don’t know yet that you’re about to switch to a new host.

1. Cre­ate mailboxes

Before telling all the DNSs about your new host you need to cre­ate mail­boxes there for all of your peace-n-hope.org email accounts. All good web hosts will give you a nice admin­is­tra­tive web page where you can add, edit, and delete mail­boxes. The details vary greatly from host to host, but your new host should have sent you infor­ma­tion about this when you signed up.

2. Test mailboxes

Once your mail­boxes are set up you won’t be able to test them fully: any email you send to your domain name will still go back to the mail­boxes on your old host. But your new host prob­a­bly pro­vides a web-based way for you to check email, so if noth­ing else you can at least log into your mail­box via the web to con­firm it’s set up.

3. Gather con­nec­tion information

If you plan to down­load your email from the web host to a mail pro­gram like Out­look or Apple Mail you’ll need some infor­ma­tion about access­ing your new mail­box. This is most com­monly done via the Post Office Pro­to­col, which is almost always referred to as “POP” or “POP3”. This infor­ma­tion is normally:

• Incom­ing (POP) mail server name
• The port num­ber for email (110 unless spec­i­fied otherwise)
• User name
• Pass­word
• Maybe: whether the server requires encryption
• Maybe: the type of encryp­tion it uses

Your web host should be able to give you this infor­ma­tion. In fact, if they have an FAQ page you’re almost cer­tain to find help there since these ques­tions are, you know… fre­quently asked.

Once you have the infor­ma­tion it would be an excel­lent idea to test your email pro­gram using the new host, just to be sure every­thing works as you would expect. You should do this by adding a new account in your email pro­gram rather than by replac­ing your cur­rent email account infor­ma­tion, since you aren’t yet ready to switch over to the new host for your email.

After set­ting up the new accounts in your email pro­gram, send your­self an email using the new account/host. The email will be routed to your old host, but that’s ok. If you were able to do this it means (1) your email pro­gram is able to send mail via your new host, and (2) your email pro­gram was able to log in to your new host and check for email, even though none was there yet.

4. Down­load email

If you’ve been using web­mail directly through your old web host, or if you’ve been using an email pro­gram like Outlook/Apple Mail but leav­ing the email on the web host rather than down­load­ing it to your local com­puter, you’ll want to down­load some or all of the infor­ma­tion from your cur­rent web­mail account so you can access it later. Con­sider not only email but con­tacts, cal­en­dar entries, and other notes that your cur­rent host lets you save in your email account.

Tak­ing the Leap: Chang­ing Your DNS Entry

You’ve cre­ated your account with HopeSpringsEternal.net, uploaded and tested your web files, and cre­ated and tested your new mail­boxes, so now it’s time to tell the rest of the world that your web­site lives at HopeSpringsEternal.net instead of evil-R-us.com.

1. Sched­ule a time

The DNS update process shouldn’t cause sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems with peo­ple reach­ing your site, but to min­i­mize the risk you should pick a time when your web­site traf­fic is low. Maybe you know when this is already, but if not you could review your website’s log files if you have the tools to do that.

You should also take into account when your email traf­fic is high­est. Dur­ing the domain tran­si­tion it’s pos­si­ble you could lose email unless you pro­tect your­self. See the side­bar (“Email Through the Cracks”) for steps you can take to pre­vent that.

You might want to inform peo­ple who visit your site or who email you, though if all goes well they shouldn’t see a dis­rup­tion. You’d mainly be warn­ing them so they’re braced in case all doesn’t go well.

2. Update Your DNS Entry

How do you update the DNS entry for your domain? In the old days you had to call, email, or some­times even ground mail instruc­tions to the orga­ni­za­tion that man­ages your domain—the domain reg­is­trar. Today most DNS changes can be made by the per­son who owns the domain (hope­fully you) by com­plet­ing a sim­ple web form.

In most cases you can make these changes whether or not you’re for­mally listed as the domain’s Admin­is­tra­tive Con­tact: if you have the login infor­ma­tion for the site, you can make the changes. This can be a sig­nif­i­cant issue for non­prof­its, where turnover in cer­tain roles is some­times high. But even if the per­son who reg­is­tered the domain is no longer with your non­profit, any­one else work­ing there who has the login infor­ma­tion can make the change—even a (trusted!) vol­un­teer or consultant.

Maybe you’re an orga­ni­za­tional guru, and just after you orig­i­nally reg­is­tered the domain name, you filed away the loca­tion of your registrar’s web page and your login infor­ma­tion. If so, you’re golden. Make the change at the time you’ve scheduled.

1. Log into your registrar’s web site.
2. Find a page that lets you edit your DNS entry for the domain.
3. Find the place on the page that lists the cur­rent DNSs for your domain. You’ll most likely find two DNSs, one pri­mary and one secondary.
4. Replace these old DNS names with the DNS names that your new web host provided.

3. Can’t fig­ure out how to update your DNS entry?

If you don’t have login infor­ma­tion for the site that lets you man­age your domain name, you’ll need to con­tact your domain reg­is­trar for help.

This will almost cer­tainly throw a delay into your domain trans­fer process, so allow extra time: cer­tainly days, but to be safe a week or two in case you need to resort to old-school meth­ods like ground mail con­fir­ma­tion. If you’re not sure who your reg­is­trar is, see the side­bar “WHOIS My Registrar?”

4. Wait

As I men­tioned ear­lier, there are gajil­lions of DNSs sprin­kled around the inter­net. You’ve spec­i­fied which two servers are the coolest (most author­i­ta­tive) for your par­tic­u­lar domain, but all of the other DNSs in the world need to grad­u­ally get word of the change. So the change you made above really just kicked off a process of infor­ma­tion prop­a­gat­ing through the Inter­net to all the other DNSs. Prop­a­ga­tion takes a while to complete.

It’s rea­son­ably likely that you and peo­ple near you will see the new host within 3–4 hours, but 12 hours isn’t unheard of, and it might take 72 hours before all the DNSs in the Inter­net are up to date. In the mean time your world will look like this:

That means for a while some peo­ple will be see­ing your old host and some will be see­ing your new host.

It also means some people’s email will go to your old host, and some to your new host. Which is poten­tially ugly: once the DNS update is com­plete for you, you might not be able to get to your email on your old host any more: vis­it­ing mail.peace-n-hope.org (for exam­ple) will now take you to your new host. See the side­bar for a tip on deal­ing with that ugliness.

While you wait for the changes to take effect, don’t make any changes to the site. If you absolutely have to, make the changes to both the old and the new site since both sites will be in use by some peo­ple for the next few hours or days.

All Done… Mostly

You’ll know you’re look­ing at the new web host as soon as you can browse to your domain and see the unique new change you made above (“Leave a Trace”). So now your world looks like this:

As soon as pos­si­ble, do a good re-testing of the site, again pay­ing spe­cial atten­tion to the most tricky or com­pli­cated parts of the site. If your site pro­duces any RSS feeds, check those too. If something’s wrong, well… fix it.

If you have a local email pro­gram like Out­look or Apple Mail, you should update it to start using your new web host. As dis­cussed above, your host should have pro­vided the nec­es­sary setup infor­ma­tion. If you don’t have it, con­tact your new web host for help, and in the mean time use your new host’s web­mail option. Test your email pro­gram by send­ing a mes­sage to your­self at your domain name.

If you’re using Google Web­mas­ter Tools or another web ana­lyt­ics pack­age, you might need to re-verify that the pack­age rec­og­nizes your site in its new loca­tion. (If you don’t know what I’m talk­ing about, ignore this paragraph.)

Once your new host is live you should leave your account active with the old host for at least a week, and ide­ally a month. This is mainly in case you real­ize you’ve left some­thing behind. Once you can­cel your old host, your files will become inaccessible.

And once you’ve can­celled your old host account, congratulations!

You’re done!

Other Resources

You might find some of these pages help­ful in pro­vid­ing other tips and details.

• How to Han­dle a Web­site Migra­tion from One Web Host to Another
• Move Your Web Site to Another Host­ing Service
• Main­tain­ing Your Search Engine Rank­ing Despite Host Migration
• Smooth Web Move
• How To Move Your Web­site When You Change Host­ing Companies
• Back Up Your Web­site, Just In Case
• On The Move: Mov­ing Your Site
• How to Trans­fer Your Web Site to Another Host With­out Los­ing It

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