Moving a web site from one web hosting company to another can be a very scary task. Even the littlest mistake can be extremely costly. You never know what kind of information you could loose. The tips in this article should help you prevent any issues when switching web hosting companies.

Moving Databases:

The first thing that most webmasters forget about when they swap hosting companies is to move their SQL databases. Depending on how the old and new hosts are set up, this could be a very easy task or an extremely difficult one. For instance, some free hosts with their own clone of cPanel don’t have features set up so that you can collect an SQL database into a file. However, using some PHP commands, one could write a program to collect all the variables within every table and post them to a text document. Once the site is moved, then a new program could be written to reverse this process.

That, however, is a worst-case scenario, and it’s easy to make mistakes that could still cause to loose loads of data. Most of the time though, you will be dealing with a regular cPanel if you use a premium web host. The actual cPanel program will allow you to backup the database though the “phpMyAdmin” program. From there, you can move the backup file to the new server and restore the backup from there. This method often allows for a much cleaner move, while all of the data’s formatting is kept the same. Always make sure that you have a full complete backup of your website (all files and databases)  before you cancel your old web hosting account.

Hosting Feature Differences:

Sometimes what the webmasters fail to understand is that different web hosting companies have support for different scripting languages. If one were to have YABB (Yet Another Bulletin Board) installed on their old server, and try to move it to a server without PERL support, then their website isn’t going to work no matter what they do. Some functions cannot be preformed using different hosting companies, so it’s important that you check for things like this before moving.

Finally, if you have a high traffic site and just found a deal that seems too good to be true, take a look on how much bandwidth they offer. When doing this, be honest with yourself. How many visitors do you think you’ll end up getting per day? How many pages do you think each of your visitors are going to view? Are there big images on your website? It’s extremely important to take these facts into consideration because once it’s too late and your site is shut down for the month, visitors who see this aren’t likely to return. Try to find an average sized webpage, and use that to make your calculations. Sometimes the outcome can be quite surprising.

Changing web hosting companies is not as simple as it sounds, and for the most part shouldn’t be
done unless absolutely necessary. Just because you can hit the “download” and “upload” buttons in your FTP program doesn’t mean that you have enough knowledge to move your entire website.

Most Important: Do not cancel your old web hosting account until your website is running perfectly on your new web hosting account.