Transferring your website to a new hosting company is a relatively simple process and can even be carried out without your website experiencing any downtime.

Follow the steps below for our simple guide to transferring your site to another hosting provider.

Websites without a database

· Choose a new web hosting company and set up an account with them.

· Use FTP to transfer your site to the new account. You can ensure everything is working correctly by typing the new IP address into your browser and visiting the site.

· Next, you need to change the nameservers over to the new web hosting company. You can do this by logging into your domain name account. There are usually two nameservers listed and they will probably have an address such as NS1.webhost.com. If you purchased your domain name from your present web hosting providers, you may need to contact them to do this for you. It generally takes around 1 or 2 days for the information to update and once this happens your site will automatically be hosted from the new servers.

· Don’t forget to cancel your existing account once all the data has been updated. A simple way of checking everything is in place is by making a small edit to the old website and once this doesn’t show up, you can be assured it has transferred to the new hosts, allowing you to cancel your old account.

Websites with a database

If your website contains a database, it’s important that no information is lost during the transfer to the new web hosting provider. If the database contains only a small amount of information, the process will be similar to that outlined above.

· Choose a new web hosting company and set up an account with them.

· Perform a backup of the database and use FTP to transfer it to a second PC or to your PC at home.

· Next, FTP the entire website to your new web hosting account. You can ensure everything is working correctly by typing the new IP address into your browser and visiting the site. Create a new database and give it the same name as the old one. Restore it to your website using a backup file.

· Next, you need to change the nameservers over to the new web hosting company. You can do this by logging into your domain name account. There are usually two nameservers listed and they will probably have an address such as NS1.webhost.com. If you purchased your domain name from your present web hosting providers, you may need to contact them to do this for you. It generally takes around 1 or 2 days for the information to update and once this happens your site will automatically be hosted from the new servers.

· For websites containing a database, it’s preferable to take down the site until the nameservers have updated as this ensures the database keeps its integrity. Don’t forget that it’s still possible for consumers to write data to the database held on the old server while updating is taking place. One method of dealing with this is to arrange a setup whereby any data written to the old site is automatically transferred to the new one. For help with this, contact your new hosting provider.

· Don’t forget to cancel your existing account once all the data has been updated. A simple way of checking everything is in place is by making a small edit to the old website and once this doesn’t show up, you can be assured it has transferred to the new hosts, allowing you to cancel your old account.