My website was on shared hosting in the USA before but I've moved it to a VPS in UK about a 6 weeks ago. However when I check the raw access logs on the shared hosting account, traffic is still coming to the old server (organic traffic through google). I understand that it takes about 72 hours for DNS propagation but ideally you should wait for a week for ISPs to refresh their cached data but it's been 6 weeks now and although the new server is receiving the majority of the traffic, I'm concerned why some traffic is still going to the old server. I've contacted both web hosting companies and they said there's nothing wrong with the configuration of their server. The website properly resolves to the new IP as well. Anyone has any ideas why this is happening? Thanks.
If your DNS settings are definitely correct then traffic hitting the old server might continue for a while. Many DNS servers are set-up to ignore TTLs from domains and only renew their cache on their own schedule which some idiots set-up at several weeks. There's nothing you can do about that except set-up a permanent re-direct from your old server/site and hope that these DNS servers eventually update.
Thanks for the reply RonBrown. It's very frustrating to tell you the truth. 1-2 weeks is understandable but 6 weeks, c'mon, it's taking the piss. Fortunately I've got like 6 months left on the old shared hosting site, so i'm not paying anything more but having to keep 2 databases in sync is a killer. I've thought about doing a permanent redirect on the old server but the problem is that i need to redirect all urls on the old server to the same urls but on the new server. This means i cannot use the domain name but will have to use the ip address instead in the url because if i use the domain name, the ISP will take the user back to the old server. Here's the scenario: old server : domain.co.uk/something (301 redirect - 100.199.200.288/something) First the user will see an ip address in the url and it's not reassuring because most people are used to seeing a domain name. Once on the new server at the 100.199.200.288/something url, if they click on some other link eg domain.co.uk/otherurl, they will be taken back to old website. I suppose i could get away with the problem if i didn't have absolute urls but the first problem of having an IP address in the url won't still be solved.
Several weeks is very odd indeed. As Bohra suggested above, try using a site like http://traceroute.org to ping your site from different locations. I would also suggest that you plug your domain name in here to verify that your DNS health is good, as bad DNS records can cause this issue as well, since some ISP's will not update their records if there are any errors present. Chris
I've done it all - tried the pinging service and the new IP address is correctly shown. I've also used the intodns.com and there's no problem there (even had the support guy for the new VPS checked it). So everything is working as it should but nevertheless traffic is still coming to the old site to this day. Any other pointers?