Hi guys, i had my site hosted for about a year on one particular host. My hosting had expired last month and now i have decided to migrate to another host. but the problem is that i am not quite aware of the process of changing the host without affecting the website. i tried out by just changing the nameservers. but this didn't help. can you guys help??
Don't change the nameservers. Change your DNS entries ("A" records) on the existing nameservers to point to the new host. That will start bringing traffic to your new server. Setup the new host to serve pages for your domain and you should be all set.
Ok. If you have cPanel you can do a full backup from within cPanel. Then go to your new host and ask them to import the backup. Then update your nameservers to go to your new account. If you don't have cPanel or even if you do then instead of doing a full backup just move over your files and databases etc. Once you have moved everything, you then update your nameservers or dns records so you have no downtime.