Moving Your Website Efficiently

Everyone who owns a web site will change their web host company at one time or another.  Sometimes this may be just switching to new hardware from old. This usually means finding a whole new web host company to host your web site.  When you are making this decision, there are some issues to consider.

You will either want to continue to maintain your hardware and software at a site managed by others, or you will want to upgrade to newer systems managed by others. This will mean changing software and hardware.

When you are deciding to do this you will have to weigh the short term problems and impact against the long term benefits.  If you are now using a facility that is running short on capacity, you will eventually have to decide to move out of necessity.  Or the hardware will become so loaded that you will have to migrate or your needs will increase to the level of making it a necessity to move to continue to grow and get the needs that you have met.

You may also be forced to move when you have put yourself in the position that you rely on the host company for everything and the staff and systems will sooner or later, become unresponsive and no longer meet your needs.

Most of the time, the decision to make this move is spurred by emotions.  You must remain in control of your emotions in business as the emotion of anger will get you into places you had no intentions of going.  If staying with your current web host company means putting up with minor inconveniences and problems, you should probably stay.  If the problems are costing you customers, it is time to change.

When you are serious about changing, you should do this according to numbers.  Either you need to keep track of or get from the hosting company, a report about the availability and current usage.  If it turns out that the server is not on line enough, or is so busy that it is driving your customers away, this would be reason to change.

At some point you need to be able to talk to the person or people who help keep your site running smoothly. Even if you do most of the work yourself, server, database, and site maintenance, there is someone behind the scenes helping things run smoothly.

When it comes to technical network issues, bandwidth, and availability, server capacity, security, disk space and a large variety of other issues, the hosting company has to have competent staff.  If the company you are with have people that are not up to par and fall short of the goal, for one reason or another, your web site will suffer. This is one of the most common reasons for people changing hosting companies.

Even if the company you chose in the beginning was great, things can change, mostly staff, and when this falls below par and you begin losing visitors, you will have to make a decision. Sometimes it is hardware that needs to change, sometimes its people, you just need to find a good fit.