This guide is to give you a simple rundown on how to plan your move to digiweb hosting.

Quick Tips

In order to make the move as smooth as possible, there are a couple of points to note:

• Website moves are sometimes not instantaneous

While the content may move to us, you will find that after you update DNS records and delete the content from your old hosting provider, there will still be cached results on the internet for up to 24hrs after a move. This will result in your site not appearing to the WWW and 404 errors. In order to prevent this and reduce the impact it is best to drop the TTL to a low number, as explained next.

• Drop the TTL (time to live) to a low number

TTL, or in simple terms - time to live, is a limit on the period of time a websites DNS record lasts before it's discarded. TTL is measured in seconds. Default TTL is 24hrs, or 86400 seconds A TTL value of 86400 would mean that if a DNS record was changed, DNS servers around the world could still be showing the old value from their cache for up to 24 hours after the change, thus reducing the seconds to 600 would mean that the DNS records will last for 10 minutes before refreshing. If you need assistance on editing your TTL records ask your existing host to drop your TTL to 600 seconds roughly 1 day before a planned website move

• Backup all your email

Depending on your existing setup, you may have mails stored on your mailserver with your existing provider. When you move your hosting account, you will lose access to your existing mailbox. It is best practice to either download these emails to your desktop email client (Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird etc), or discard them if you wish. Also note that email is a constant service and also has TTL values as explained above. Dropping a TTL value for an email record would be advised to have minimal email downtime.

• Plan your move

Is your website busy? Is it mostly used during office hours? These are questions to ask yourself before moving a website. If your website is primarily used during business hours, its advisable to plan a move late in the week or over a weekend. This in return means less impact on the website downtime towards its userbase and in cases of business e-commerce websites, less loss of potential customers.

The above is the advise our support representative team offer to our clients. Planning a move in advance is a step in the right direction to less downtime, overall issues and stress for all involved.

Stage one

By means of FTP using your favorite FTP application:

• Backup your website content by downloading it to your local computer.

By means of your existing providers control panel/database management:

• Backup your databases and download a copy of these to your local computer.

Email:

• Backup your email by means of downloading emails to your email application.

Stage Two

Now that you have all your content backed up, in order to upload the content to Digiweb Hosting, you will need to check the following:

• You have added your domain name to our hsphere control panel
  

If you have a database:

• You have created a database within the hsphere control panel for your website

Emails

• Note that emails once downloaded to your computer cannot be re-uploaded to your mailbox unless you send them all to yourself

This will result in the mails appearing from yourself sent on the date you sent them.

Uploading content

Uploading web content

With your favorite FTP application, connect to the direct hostname of the server your content will reside on, your FTP username and your password you would have received in an email when your order was completed. This hostname will be in the form of

WinX or webX.hosting.digiweb.ie Where X is number 1 to 9

So for the basis of this article our hosting is on

• web8.hosting.digiweb.ie

Our FTP username is:

• digiwebt

Password:

• The password we received in our welcome email when our order was successfully completed

Once you have these entered correctly you can connect to the server where you will see a folder named after your website Remember to upload your content into this folder, as this is the folder the World Wide Web will see

Depending on the data weight of your files (4MBs vs 140MBs) and internet connection speed, uploading can take time. It is best to let the upload process complete before commencing other programs on your computer.

Once uploading is complete, keep a copy of the files on your computer in case there is any corruption during the upload, or just for future peace of mind. Having a backup is better than none at all!