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How to switch to a new web host the easy way

Does your current web host need to be fired? Does the thought of having to transfer to a new host make you nervous? With a little help from this guide, it won’t be nearly as bad as you think. With a little planning, moving to your new web host will actually be pretty simple.

I will assume your current host must have some problems for you to be moving. The first thing you will want to do is make sure you have found a web host that will eliminate the current problems without adding any new issues. A few things to consider from a new web host are:

• The terms and conditions.

• Can you set up a monthly plan or are you locked in to a long term contract?

• What is their customer service like?

• Will you get the price that is advertised?

• Is a full payment up front required?

• Do they offer a full money back guarantee?

• Do they have the email service you are after?

• The list goes on and on, but you get the idea.

Once your new web host is found and you have signed up for your new account, You will want to start making backups of your current website’s files. For this you will need an FTP client to download all of your files onto your computer. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is the easiest and most efficient way to transfer files from your computer to a server or visa versa.

Once all of your website files are safely on your computer, you can now upload everything up to your new web host (server). You will need to test the new site to make sure that your pages and layout is all working and looking correct. It might really suck to do all of this, but you will want to check for broken links as well as image links. Also check to make sure that all the formatting of text is correct. IT is for this very reason that I am such a strong advocate of using a CMS such as WordPress or Joomla. Using one of the popular content management systems virtually eliminates any problems with html code.

After your website is up and running, you will need to re-make all of your active email accounts. Keep in mind that your new email accounts will not be active until your domain is pointing at your new server. Don’t get too worried about this because the whole time you are doing this set up, you still have your old site and email working from your old host. Even during the time when you make the final switch, you can set up an auto-responder from your old server to let your customers know what is going on. The best time to do all of this would be over a weekend or even a holiday so your traffic is low and you will minimize the disruption to your customers.

The next step in this proccess is to point your domain name to the new server. This is called switching the DNS. If you don’t have access to your domain settings you will have to contact your domain registrar and have them point your domain. The beauty of setting up the new server ahead of time is that once the domain gets pointed to the new server, there shouldn’t be much downtime. If you do this over a weekend, nobody should ever know that your site was even moved.

You will want to keep your old web hosting account open for at least a month after the switch. This way you can be sure to get all of your email accounts working properly. It will also serve as a backup just in case something happens during the domain pointing process (quite unlikely).

Joomla on Linux Web Hosting

Web Hosting helps you to make your website live on the web and Content Management Systems provide users with a simple platform to create and manage the content of their websites, without having to incur web design fees for all changes.

As a lot of people prefer to use open source operating systems and application software, Joomla on Linux hosting is a favourite combination for today’s webmasters.

Joomla is a free open source CMS (Content Management System) that provides you with a powerful yet simple interface to add, remove and modify website content, images and develop product gallery pages. Here is a list of features that come with Joomla!

Page caching for better performance
RSS Feeds
News Flash
Blog
Polls
Search option
Language internationalization

With these features developers can design advanced Web 2.0 websites easily. RSS, Blogs, Polls, Search options and Internationalization or Localization are the features very much essential for modern interactive websites and you get all the features under one roof by choosing Joomla!

Professional Linux web hosting providers offer Joomla as an integrated part of their hosting service. Like Linux, Joomla is also an open source application built with PHP and it uses MySQL database by default. Joomla on Linux hosting offers a flexible website management environment for users.

Linux hosting providers generally offer Joomla for free as a part of their hosting plans. While choosing your web hosting service, look for the provider that offers Joomla so that it becomes easy for you to manage you website.

Joomla! 1.5.6 was released in August 2008 and solves a lot of security issues. Popular hosting service providers have already upgraded Joomla so that their clients can access the latest technologies.

If you have been using Joomla, upgrade it now, or contact your service provider to inquire if they can help you get the upgraded version.

Service Is Key In Web Hosting

E-commerce is a major trend in the marketing world today, it does not require the normal characteristics of an everyday market, it just for you to have a computer, an internet connection and one of the first challenges that you will face would be to design a website. If you want to do this on your own then you have to learn basic computer packages that will enable you to own a website, then after meeting this challenge, the next step will be to find a suitable web hosting company that will publish or host your website. You have to select a good web hosting plan one that will not compromise any functionality that will deter the success of your e-commerce company.

When you want to consider a web hosting company, you have to listen to some history concerning major practice in the industry; you should consider what you might learn from proper industry practice. Considering that as a customer, you will want the best service available, and you want one that does not have frequent or long outages. A good way of knowing this is to have a chat with a customer of the particular web hosting company, you should request for the record of their services before making a choice. In this business, you do not want to be out of service for a long time because when customers cannot reach you, then they cannot make transactions. And this is a very bad condition for your business.

What you will have to guarantee next is that the web hosting company or the web host service provider should ensure a round the clock service and customer support. This will guarantee that there are no mistakes technically. This is a major consideration that you should resolve with the web hosting provider. The customer service should have a 24 hours ready support system because there may be a situation of fluctuations in services provided by the company and the customer has to be able to reach the host always, as this will guarantee a good business partnership between them. In most companies, customer support is not paid for rather they come free or are accounted for in the initial sign-up fee.

Macromedia and multimedia elements that includes animations, music and cartoons requires a high bandwidth specification and only a good web hosting plan can accommodate such high graphic plans. So the web host has to know the kind of service that it will be providing to the customer and the required bandwidth also needs adequate disk space for storing this huge graphic packages. It is important that you balance your bandwidth and your storage capacity; this requires planning, logical steps careful consideration of the type of data you want to upload on the web site.

You should ensure that your web hosting plan is manageable remotely by you through a control panel. Tasks like installation and updating of scripts, administering of your domain mailbox and other administrative duties that involves your own personal business. A good web hosting plan should have a tutorial and an easy learning package that will enable the customer easy administration and use of control panels.

Customers are rational so what determines the choice of a web hosting plan is the cost which is not supposed to be a perfect criteria in choice making. Because of high active competition in web hosting business, providers usually offer cheap hosting deals and you should know that most of these cheap hosting deals usually come with substandard services. If you want genuine and reliable web hosting services, then forget about the cost and look at what the web hosting company can offer to you as an end user.