I have a website that is 11 years old, and has always had the same host. The service is terrible, and it is down a lot. I'd like to change hosts, but I heard that changing hosts might be bad for traffic. I rank very highly on google for some high demand keywords and I don't want to lose my rankings. All of the traffic for the site free from the search engines. Any opinions would be appreciated.
As far as I know, and I've experienced, changing host causes loss in traffic. However, if your site is solid, it won't take long for it to get back to normal.
Better have a one time loss in traffic by changing hosts, than having to cope with loads of downtime and losing alot of traffic indefinitely.
A week or two. I'm just talking from my experiences though, so keep it in mind it doesn't go any further than just a guess.
Hi there, My suggestion: make the switch on Sunday. Why? Normally your traffic is lower on sundays so only a few regular visitors of yours will be affected. Expect 5 or 6 days of low traffic after that: your traffic will be impacted by the infamous DNS Propagation. Additionally, you should let know your users about the switch. They will appreciate it.
No, if you do it properly. Do the change off hours over the weekend and make sure DNS fully propagates. Should be pretty seamless.
Solution: Buy the new server and move everything there. Make sure everything is fine and work. THEN One the current host make lil banner somewhere visible saying "If you see this banner, it's means DNS are not updated, you'r surfing on the old site" or what ever ... even put nothing for transparent move. AFTER Change the DNS of your domain from the old to the new one. This way until dns fully propagate user will still see the site on its old host. Then as soon as dns take effect user will then surf on your new host. Cheer
I've done transparent moves a few times. As long as the user's dns is updated (ie: they're not caching things like roadrunner and aol do), then you should be fine. Assuming you have root / reseller access to your server, and cpanel on it here's what you can do to prevent data / user loss. Firstly, login to the old server, go into clusters, add the NEW server as a cluster, ip and everything. Secondly, do the same with the new. You may not have to do this step if CPanel says "we've setup clustering on the old server as well", it's a catch 22 there. Thirdly, on the NEW (and old) server, go into clustering, enable it Fourthly, on the NEW (and old) server, tell each to 'synchronize changes', then click submit. This will make any changes instananeous. Let things sit for a bit, then move the accounts using WHM's transfer options DNS should instantly refer traffic from old to new. Now, go remove the clustering from old servers, and change your DNS ip's at your registrar. Now, there's one other thing you can do if you're running a forum. Change the sql host to the host of the NEW server (make sure it's allowed access through whm/cpanel first). Now, if you're not running CPanel, you can do the transfer manually, and update DNS manually, then sync DNS from NEW server onto old server, and restart dns on old server, then change nameserver ip's. Of course, again, that's assuming you have root access.