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Moving to a New Host? A How-to Guide

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, leave a window for yourself before your next payment is due with your current hosting provider. Approximately 2-4 weeks should be available, depending on your timeline, your designers or any other staff that you have to help you move your site to its new home.

Steps to follow once you sign up for a new hosting provider:

1. Make sure you have all login/passwords/control panel information before you start anything. Don't forget your login information to your domain name and if you don't have it, find out how to get access to it, so you can make the appropriate decision.

2. Upload and install your entire site to the new host. Leave your website on your old host the way it is. Don't forget that if you own your own SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate, you will have to change some information for it to work on the new provider.

3. Test your website and make sure everything is working 100%

4. Go to your domain registrar and make the appropriate DNS changes and switch to your new DNS should take anywhere from 24-72 hours. At this point you might see some weird things happening, like your website experiencing some delays showing up on your browser or email taking a little longer than normal. You might want to check emails on both servers because it does happen on occasion that email will go to one or the other during this period. Your new site at this point will only be accessible via IP address. The entire DNS switch called propagation.