Let’s say that some time ago you chose best shared web hosting. But almost everyone has a situation where you want to change company. Usually, beginners do not consider all criteria or prioritize them incorrectly.
Therefore, even the best rated provider may not be suitable. Sometimes it is enough to analyze shared hosting plans and choose a different tariff. The situation is more complicated if you are in doubt about shared hosting security.
In this case, you should consider buying a dedicated server. It is much more expensive, but also much safer. All relevant criteria can be checked at https://sitechecker.pro/shared-hosting/.
1. Some Technical Knowledge
Any site is a set of symbols, files, databases that are converted into typeset pages. In order for these pages to be seen by all users on the Internet, the data must be uploaded to the server.
This is a special computer that works 24 hours a day and provides constant access to the site. In fact, hosting is renting space on such a server.
At some point, the characteristics of the server may not be enough, and the site needs to be moved. In this article, we will tell you when to do it and how to do it painlessly for your project.
2. What Is Shared Web Hosting?
Shared hosting is the most popular and cheapest type of hosting. Server capacities are distributed among several clients, due to which the virtual hosting rates are the lowest. Even novice users can cope with setting up such a hosting: popular providers provide a convenient control panel for hosting. This option is suitable for light business card sites or small blogs that need basic functionality.
CMS hosting is a kind of virtual hosting optimized for working with CMS. These are such systems for creating, editing, and managing site content – they are also called “engines”. The most popular CMS: WordPress, Joomla, 1C-Bitrix, OpenCart, Drupal, and MODX. If your site operates on one of these systems, then choosing a CMS hosting will allow you not to understand the settings, but immediately get a guaranteed result – high page loading speed and greater server stability.
VDS / VPS virtual server is a separate allocated space on a physical server that you will not share with other users. Thanks to hardware virtualization technology, performance losses are minimized (compared to working on a physical server). VDS is most often chosen by popular sites with heavy traffic and large amounts of data.
The hoster gives you full access to the software and hardware components of the server. Plus, one VDS can host several of your sites, their number is limited only by the resources in your tariff plan. But it is important to understand that, although a virtual server provides much more opportunities, its administration also requires a lot of knowledge and skills.
3. Clarify What The Server Hardware Affects
When choosing a virtual VDS / VPS server in the tariffs, you can see the description of the capacities. It usually includes the amount of memory and the type of internal storage, the size of the RAM, and the number of processor cores. Internal storage affects the amount of content that you can store on the site, and the speed of the site also depends on it.
There are four types of drives: HDD, SSD, HDD + SSD hybrid, and NVMe SSD. HDDs are the slowest and rarely found in hosting, just like hybrid HDD + SSD. SSDs are at least twice as fast, and moving from HDD to SSD will give you a tangible boost in performance. NVMe SSDs are much faster than the previous two but at the same time much more expensive.
The processor also affects how quickly heavy content (for example, a bulky catalog of an online store) opens, and RAM determines how many users can simultaneously work with it (taking into account the limitations of the drive and processor).
4. Make A Backup
Have you decided on a provider and tariff? You need to prepare a backup of your site for the transfer. There are several ways to make a backup.
- If your site uses one of the standard CMS (WordPress, Joomla, 1C-Bitrix, OpenCart, Drupal, and MODX), you can use their backup tools. For example, WordPress has a free extension that can make daily backups of your website to the cloud of your choice.
- The second way is to make a backup using the provider’s tools. Some providers provide their own backup services: you can check whether they are there or not in your personal account.
- The third way is to save files manually. To do this, go to the site’s FTP server and download all the folders to a separate location on your computer. Then, through the method of accessing the databases provided by the provider (for example, a web database manager or SSH access to a server with them), we download the database of our site.
After creating a backup, you need to transfer it to a new hosting. This can be done again either by means of CMS (for example, a plugin in WordPress), or through the personal account of the new provider, or manually. In the first case, you need to use the instructions of the plugin used, in the second, see the recommendations of the new provider, and in the third, get access to FTP and manually upload the backup files (this is important if the site does not use a database). It is important to pay attention to the instructions of the provider, in which specific folder you need to download the backup files.
5. Reconfigure DNS And Test Site Performance
Before changing the DNS addresses of your domain to the DNS of a new hosting provider, be sure to check the site for a temporary domain so that everything is transferred correctly. Updating DNS addresses for users of different Internet providers in different cities can take up to two days.
If you delete the site from the old hosting during this period of time, some of the visitors whose addresses have not yet been updated will go to an empty page. You can solve this problem by putting a stub “the site is moving, everything will work soon”.
If it is critical for you that the site continues to work during the update period (for example, you have an online store), you need to create two parallel databases. The base on the old hosting will work in the same mode, and on the new hosting, orders will be formed from the new figure. So, if on the old hosting you will have orders from 1500, and on the new one – from 2000, then after moving the two databases can be combined without repeating numbers.
