Blog / friday roundup
Top 10 questions we get about moving hosts
The ten questions every site owner asks before switching hosts, answered plainly: downtime, email, DNS timing, and what we need from you.
Our Friday lists are usually about tools. This one is about questions, because when people write to us about moving their site, it's nearly always some mix of the same ten. Here they are, with the answers we give every week, in the order people usually ask them.
The fear questions
1. Will my site go down?
Done properly, no. The trick is that a migration has two separate steps: copying the site to the new server, and pointing the domain at it. During the copy, your old site keeps running untouched. Visitors only move over when DNS changes, and by then the new copy is already up and tested. The outages people remember come from doing those steps in the wrong order.
2. Will I lose my email?
This is the question people are most nervous about, and it's the one that deserves the most planning. Mailboxes hosted at your old provider need to be recreated and their contents moved before DNS changes. Mail that arrives mid-switch is not lost; sending servers retry for hours or days. The real risk is forgetting a mailbox exists. Make a list of every address, including the forwarders nobody remembers creating.
3. Can something get lost in the copy?
Only if nobody checks. We compare file counts, database contents, and a working clone of the site before anything goes live. You should also take your own backup before any migration, whoever does it. We've written before about backups you've actually tested, and the week you change hosts is exactly when one matters.
The timing questions
4. How long does the whole thing take?
The copy itself is usually measured in hours, mostly depending on how big the site is. The calendar time is usually a few days, because the sensible schedule is: copy, test, then change DNS at a quiet time. Rushing all three into one evening is how mistakes happen.
5. What's this "propagation" delay everyone mentions?
DNS answers get cached around the internet for as long as your records' TTL allows. After the switch, some visitors reach the new server immediately and stragglers follow over the next several hours. You can shrink this window by lowering the TTL a day or two in advance, which is one of the small things we do as a matter of course.
6. When's the best time to switch?
Whenever your site is quietest. For most small businesses that's late evening or a weekend morning. There's no technical reason to fear a weekday, but there's no reason to pick your busiest one either.
The practical questions
7. What do you need from me?
Three things, usually: access to your current hosting control panel (or a full backup file), a list of your email addresses, and access to wherever your domain's DNS is managed. That last one is the piece people most often don't know, and it's worth finding out before moving day.
8. Do I need to tell my old host?
Not before the move, and please don't cancel the old account until the new site has been live and stable for at least a week or two. The old account is your safety net. Cancelling it on day one is the single most common self-inflicted wound we see.
9. Will my site behave differently on new servers?
Occasionally, and it's almost always PHP settings or a caching difference rather than anything mysterious. This is why the testing step exists. A site that's been checked on the new server before DNS changes very rarely surprises anyone afterwards.
10. What does a migration cost?
With us, nothing: migrations to our hosting plans are free, done by our engineers, and scheduled around your quiet hours. We'd rather do the move ourselves than untangle one that went sideways.
If you're weighing a move, the honest summary is that a good migration is boring. Copy, test, switch, wait, then cancel the old account later. If you'd like us to look at your site and tell you what your specific move would involve, get in touch and ask; the answer costs nothing either.