People imagine a migration as copying files. The copying is easy. What determines whether you have downtime is how the internet finds your server, and how fast it notices when you change your mind.<\/p>\n
Here is the real process.<\/p>\n
Before you touch anything, find the current Time to Live on your DNS records. It is usually a day. Lower it to 300 seconds several days in advance and let it sit there.<\/p>\n
That change is what makes rollback possible. Once the TTL has expired across your visitors and intermediate resolvers, a DNS change propagates in about five minutes instead of a day. If something goes wrong you can point the record back and recover quickly, rather than watching your site stay broken while caches age out.<\/p>\n
Skipping this is how a two-hour migration becomes a two-day outage.<\/p>\n
You can look at your real domain on the new server before the world can. Add a line to your computer’s hosts file mapping your domain to the new server IP, then load it. Your browser goes to the new host while every other visitor still goes to the old one.<\/p>\n
That is the only way to genuinely test. Browsing by IP address proves almost nothing, because the site will break the moment it sees a request for a domain it does not expect. Test the real hostname with the real URLs, forms, and redirects: click every page, submit every form, try every login.<\/p>\n
Full backup of files, database, and DNS records before anything starts. Document the exact old values so the record can be restored without guessing. Keep the old host live for a week after cutover, because rollback is only a five-minute fix if the old machine is still running.<\/p>\n
Plan the switch for a low-traffic period, expect one to three hours, and tell your team. A migration done quietly at 2am is the same work as one done at 2pm, except nobody is awake to answer the question that appears at 2:03am.<\/p>\n
We charge a $350 one-time setup fee for hosting migrations, waived entirely if you purchase a web design package from us.<\/strong> If we are building the site, we already know how it should be configured.<\/p>\n If you are bringing a site built by somebody else, that fee covers the real work: what is installed, what the old configuration did, and what must be rebuilt on the new host. Migration is our most common project, and the one where a rushed job does the most damage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Moving a site is mostly a DNS problem wearing a website costume People imagine a migration as copying files. The copying is easy. What determines whether \u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":79,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hosting"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t