Hello, I am planning to move my sites from my current hosting company to another one. My worries are of course how to avoid downtime. I understand that the first thing to do is to update the registrar with the new server details. But this take from 24 to 72 hours. I though duplicating my new sites to the new host, and still leaving the existing sites on the old host (I still have a month). My questions: 1/ is that the normal procedure? 2/ will Google detect this as duplicate content and punish it? Thanks, Yoel
well that's quite normal, but can you browse your sites on old host as regular visitor (not from DNS preview or anything)??
you are best to do what you are thinking. duplicate site, when fully copied and ready on new server, switch dns. Google will either see the old or new between that 72 hrs period, then it will only resolve to the new. It cannot see both at same time. If it does, it is because of multiple bot-crawler, but content will still be on same domain, so no duplicate content there.
http://forums.tolranet.com/blog.php?b=9 explains how to minimise the time both sites are live for. If your site is static then just update the nameservers and wait 48 hours there's no issues with bots etc. If your site is dynamic as in a forum then you'll want to minimise the time both sites are serving requests for. In the case of a forum I always turn it off before the move to stop people posting and those posts being left behind and lost. One thing to remember is if you update the ns records for the domain, email can continue to go to the old server so make sure to check it via their web mail or whatever after the 48 hrs so you don't loose any data. Any issues just ask your new host they should be happy to help you.