Transferring your website or a blog to a new host can be a difficult task for a non techie, as it involves complex processes and downtime while switching to a new provider.
Here are few simple and easy steps that will let you transfer your website with almost no down time.
Step 1-
Purchase your new account.
It is always a good practice to purchase new hosting account a month or two weeks before cancelling old account. This will help you to transfer your website safely and easily.
This is true for large websites with huge traffic only, as small to medium websites are easy to transfer and they will not take more than a single day or couple or hours.
Step 2-
Take backups of all existing data. Archive your data and download it to your local hard disk. You must be careful with important data such as website code, databases and emails.
Verify the downloaded copies of your data to ensure there is no malformed or corrupt data.
Step 3-
Upload backups to new hosting account. Start moving your code and databases to new account. Restore your databases, make necessary changes in your code to make your website live.
Add a dns record as demo . yourmainwebsite . com and point this subdomain to newly provided IP-address.
Verify the demo version of transferred website to make it error free.
Step 4-
Take your website into maintenance mode with a maintenance page or make your website as read only version where users cannot add more data until you are done with transfer. In this way users will be able to view your website as a read only version.
Sync your data to new account or take fresh backup of database and restore it on new servers.
If you have cpanel you can restore full backup or partial backup to new account using cpanel restore function or ask your host to restore backup from WHM.
Step 5-
Change DNS address of your website.
The final step is to change your dns records to point all world wide requests to new account.
DNS will take 24-72 hours to replicate new changes across the internet. Usually your website will be live within 30 minutes.
Step 6-
Cancel your old hosting account.
As you have landed to new account succesfully, Now you are safe to cancel your old account.