Switching web hosting providers

Are you planning to switch you hosting service providers? I can understand how painful this could be. But before you do it, let me give you a few tips about things that you should remember and plan before you do the switch.

Most important of all, you are probably the best person to identify the reasons why you have had to switch your web hosts. Poor customer service and technical support, jamming networks, low bandwidth, insufficient space and there reasons could be many more. So the first thing you have to do is to ensure that your new hosting provider is good at all these aspects.

Consult a good site that provides tips to web hosting so that you prepare yourselves to do the switch to your new host.

A few things you might want to consider is as follows:

• Check if your new web host supports scripts and services that you have been using or, that you plan to use. If your website is a critical business website you need to ensure that your shopping carts, merchant accounts, payment gateways, ecommerce software etc. is being supported by your current hosting provider.
• Create a backup of the files and folders that you wish to transfer. It is normal for all of us to forget to copy a few files when we format our systems or, change our computers. A similar mistake when you switch you web hosting provider could prove to be very costly.
• Shop around for web hosts providing money back guarantee. Wondering why this is required? This is because it is practically not possible to ensure that your new web host is absolutely perfect in all sense before you start using them. So a money-back guarantee would ensure that you can change them if in case you do not find them useful, though I understand the whole process of changing your web host could be hell of a process.
• Check out a good web hosting directory to know about the best web hosts on the internet. You can find a list of these directories by doing a search on Google. These directories also tell you about their rankings and the positives and negatives of all these web hosts.
• The most important and most tedious of all of these is to change DNS settings. This is requires only in case you are changing registrars. You have to have the knowledge of the registrar with whom your domain is registered and also the procedure to change our DNS settings. It is advisable to gather all this information much before you actually do the switch so that you don’t end up in a soup.

These simple but easy and handy information would surely help you decide and switch your hosting provider.