Migrating Your Website
Many people regularly pop up the question of moving to another web host or IP address without having any kind of hiccups in Google. I completed a successful test of moving mattcutts.com from one IP to another by changing the host, which I will share with you. if you have a static website or you can spare a day when your website can oscillate between 2 IP addresses, it would be easier, but if your website is a dynamic one, things will be a bit difficult for you, though the concept remains the same. Let’s go through the steps involved in this.
Step 1: Sign up with a good web host provider
You can do some research work or follow some references to find a good web host for yourself. I preferred by present web host (csoft.net), which I selected after research, and I also found that the readership of the site was growing beyond my expectation. A non-SEO friend of mine used pair.com. Let me refer to the example using IP addresses. If we move from csoft.com to pair.com, the IP would change from 63.x.x.x to 65.x.x.x. DNS is a system used for mapping websites to the IP address which a machine uses, like, say, 61.115.6.132.
Step 2: Create a backup of your website on the new web host
Having a static website is good as it would just mean copying the whole file to the new web host – that’s it. But having a blog is a bit hard since it generally involves MySQL for storage of posts. Some e-Commerce sites are more difficult for this purpose as the database is always synced over there. In such a case, you might have to set up a replica of the database between the old and the new location during the transition.
Well, here, an instance is given of a WordPress blog that makes use of MySQL database and can come up with a bit of problem for some hours. Just imagine that you have made use of FTP in order to copy the static files from one web host to other. A new MySQL database has to be created now. The same username and database name might work but if it doesn’t, you are in need of putting the WordPress wp-config.php on the new location with a view to update the username, database name, and other relevant things.
Having the new SQL database, you can copy the old one to the new one and the load the database. This is quite simple.
Keep in mind that you not only have a username and a password for both the web hosts, but different usernames and passwords for the database at every single location. You may also have the MySQL database stored on a unique location, which is the reason I showed the host option while database restoration. Also, if the new host has a unique option for the database, you will be required to edit the wp-config.php file, else WordPress will be unable to access the database on your new host.
You have similar copies of your website at 2 locations. If your blog is just updated with a couple of comments daily, it’s not a big issue if a comment is posted or if someone changes your database during the period when the transition is taking place. But if your site is huge and based on e-Commerce, then you will need to work hard to keep both the databases synchronized.
Step 3: Changing the DNS to point to the new web host
This is the most important thing. When Googlebot or anyone tries to reach your site, they first look for your IP address. They do their best to ensure the genuineness by rechecking the IP address after about 500 fetches, or even check if certain number of hours have elapsed. Usually people using DNS-enabled browsers are affected by TTL [a setting - Time to Live], which is measured in seconds and says “The IP address you fetched will be safe for ‘x’ seconds; you can cache this IP address and not bother to look it up again for that many seconds.” The browser will move very slowly as you have tracked the IP address for all the content on each webpage of your website.
Sites like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. possess a bit short DNS TTL setting (300-900 seconds) because you intend to have one of them in order to make the data center mechanics perfect for endowing the machines with good data provided you have several data centers. TTL is immensely important as a short TTL lets you drag the IP address of a data center out of the rotary motion very quickly.
This also explains the days of “Google Dance” that went by. It would last for a week or so, and based on the data center which the user hit, they would see the old as well as the new results. The main reason was that every data center was brought down and brought back, after loading it with new data. It required many days to switch the data to all the centers. During the period, webmasters checked out www2.google.com or www3.google.com since they led them to the latest data centers. Nowadays, the production system is properly equipped for switching these things around in lesser time.
Step 4: Wait while the DNS change is propagated through the internet
Basically, this is a TTL function, and is based on whether you are actually switching to those name servers which are present in the DNS currently. Keep in mind that DNS is hierarchical, and it will take time for the DNS caches to be flushes as the TTL is exceeded. This switch, which cakes place at the root of DNS, would be quicker only if you use a smart registrar and a known set of the new name servers. The ‘dig+trace domain’ can be used in UNIX and Linux for verifying hat the new name server is present on the root server.
Step 5: If Googlebot is fetching from the new web host and the IP address, the process is almost over and one can shut down the previous website.
You can check your IP address by pinging your domain. The old visitors might be using the old IP address from their own DNS cache, but the new visitors should be getting the new one. Some people have a long TTL set, and they should be allowed two days. After that, you can deactivate hosting on the old location. You can check your logs for a fail-safe confirmation of this. When your log mentions no one visiting from the old location, your work is fully done.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.