Moving website hosting is like moving house, ideally it should be undertaken with lots of forward planning and a plethora of check lists.
For the last 6 years I have been with TsoHost for my website hosting and up until the last 6 months the service has been pretty reliable. However in the last few months the service levels and particularly the site speed has been dropping.
My hosting covers not only my own sites of taubman.org.uk, rjt.org.uk and fhug.org.uk, I also host a couple of sites for friends. So I had 5 domains to move.
After some research I settled on Krystal hosting and started planning for my moving date at the beginning of last week. I paid for a year upfront and started preparations to move the sites over one at a time over a few weeks. Krystal are used by the Guild of One Name studies and generally seemed to have a good reputation.
When moving sites the first job is to make sure everything is backed up to your own PC, this was not too bad for me as I do this automatically every other day using SyncBackPro in combination with a routine which backs up my databases each day on the server. The next job is to go to your DNS management and turn down the TTL (Time To Live) values for each domain. Just to explain what TTL means it’s the amount of time a computer should wait before rechecking the account to call in the “DNS Address book”.
On Thursday I had to put my plan in to action early as I awoke to find the fhug.org.uk and a couple of the others were down for maintenance again. SO . . .
It was no good I had to get moving. I had contacted Krystal support and got them to move over a couple of my sites earlier in the week as they do not change much so I completed the process changing the domain to point at their servers and got them running. After testing the emails I needed to change a couple of settings to get them to work through the advanced and so far very good spam filtering included in the Krystal package.
Next I put the fhug site into maintenance for the forums and asked the support team to get that one moving. The one real problem was I had not had time to change the TTL before the move started so a few people were not able to get on to the new site for a couple of days until their computer had looked up the address again.
All in all although the process was a bit fraught, this was mainly because of the speed I needed to make the move and the fact that the forum and wiki software had to be upgraded to use PHP 7.1 which is more secure than the old 5.6 I was running previously. The other sites are mostly all based on WordPress so it was just a case of making sure they were all up to date.
In all so far the Krystal support have been very good and I am pleased with the new speed of the sites.
Fingers crossed it all stays that way.
Featured image from pxhere