Site Transfer and Downtime

[bronxpad]

If I want to transfer my website from yahoo to another web host without having any down time how would I do that?

[KLLC]

Hello, Its pretty simple, take a complete backup of your website. Stop making changes to your website (making new posts or updates) upload your backup to new host and set or modify all new credentials and finally update the DNS from your domain control panel. That will transfer your site with seem-less and uninterrupted way. If you find this useful don't forget to thumb-up.

[Horizon]

The easiest way to minimise downtime is to lower the "TTL" (time to live) within your DNS provider, so that when you make the switch to point the domain to the new server location, this will happen quicker. The lowest (safe) amount you should have for TTL is 3600, which in human terms is 1 hour. Once the switch is successful, I would recommend putting it back to the default, which is usually 86400.

Hope that helps.

Matt

[XNUMERIK]

In addition to what has been said, I think you also need to understand how it all works for you to make the best decision.

It is all about DNS propogation, it is the time taken to update all the servers around the web with the new IP to point to when one looks for your domain name. Now yourdomain.com points to 195.81.76.22 and you want to move it to 156.22.101.85 (examples only)

While the update is propagating, some visitors will get the old IP (website on yahoo) and others will get the updated one (on the other host) so there is no downtime.

The issue is with dynamic sites (forums, blogs...) you might get data (comments, posts...) that will be made to the version on Yahoo and will be lost once everyone goes to the new host.

I your website is static, just go ahead and move your files and update your DNS records and don't worry about anything else.

If your website is dynamic, then you should copy the data at a given time and either :

• block the old website from getting comments/posts/entries...
• copy the data manually from the database once all DNS have been updated (hard to do)
• accept to lose some infos

Hope that helps