Home Technical Support How To Switch Website Hosting Providers - Part I

How To Switch Website Hosting Providers - Part I

Switching your website hosting to Brandblast can be accomplished without down time, simple follow our easy step by step guide.

Step 1: Choose your Brandblast hosting plan.

The first step is to find the perfect plan for you.  If you're just starting out with your website, we recommend our Silver Unix Plan, it provides you with lots of great features at the lowest price possible, as your needs grow you can always upgrade your plan from your HSphere control panel. If you are an intermediate to advanced user, compare our web hosting plans to determine the features you will need.

Step 2: Find Registrar Info

It is important that you are listed as the owner of your site's domain name.  Using a Whois service or your registrars website (if known), you can see who is listed as the administrative contact and who is listed as the technical contact. 

Make sure you are listed as the Administrative contact.  If you are not listed, moving will be very complex and you probably can't do it without the current host or designers permission (legally - you should always be listed as the administrative contact).

Your current host is almost always listed as the technical contact, which means they will eventually find out when you try to move your site.  We recommend not telling the current host your plans until you have already transferred the site completely. 

While you look up your site's registrar data, it is a good idea to check when your domain name expires.  If you try to move your site near expiration date, it could seriously complicate matters - you could even lose your site.  To get around this, you can extend your ownership or transfer registrars before transferring web hosts.

Step 3: Back Up All Data

We can't stress this step enough.  When we move sites, not only do we make a copy on our hard drives, but we will burn a CD copy of the site.  Some web hosts make backups of your site, but this isn't a safe assumption.

There are a few ways to back up your data.  One way is to use an ftp program to download all the data.  Another is to use software to import or publish your data to your computer.  A more tedious way to do it would be to use "file > save as html" in your browser, but you need to make sure you save the file with the right name and download all the images (right click over the image and choose save as), plus you might end up with extra code in your html that you don't want (if you are currently with a free or cheap host, there might be pop up ads or other ads hard coded into your files which you wouldn't want to bring over to your new host).

Other data that you might not think of saving is your log files.  If you use statistical programs or plan to some day, you will want to keep your log files.  If you were running any scripts or had any special folders with password access, you might want to pay close attention to how you set up those folders so you can set the permissions correctly on your new server.

Continue with: Set Up Your New Host