From a business standpoint, transferring a website is normally at an inconvenience level that registers just enough that it is something that people try and put off until they have had a chance to research it properly. It isn’t that hard to accomplish technically, but there are usually a number of steps involved that require some planning.
There are quite a few different scenarios that can be encountered by those who are building their website presence that signal a need to make a change. Here are some of the more common reasons accompanied by ways to optimize any transfer that you decide to make.
Running low on Resources
In most cases, if you start out with a shared account, your provider will offer you an unlimited amount of access from outside users so that your website has a chance to grow. But as your audience grows and you find that there are more and more users viewing your website simultaneously, your site can start to load more slowly because there simply aren’t enough resources available for it to perform like it does when just a few people are visiting it. One thing that you can do as a website owner is to look at the page load times which can be viewed in the statistics sections of many types of blogging software. If the times are consistently slower than 6 seconds, you may want to start looking at making a change. It used to be the case that the standard load time had to be seven seconds or less or you would start to lose potential readers. Today, with high-speed networks prevalent, the average person may become impatient in a shorter amount of time.
For those interested in staying with the same provider, the key is to find a provider that allows you to add resources without initiating a transfer to a different system within the same company. If you do have to ‘start over’ by manually transferring at the same company, you may be better off looking for a new company that can handle your future growth seamlessly. You will certainly save yourself some time.
Unhappy with Customer Service
Another large reason that people tend to transfer their websites is that the level of customer service that they used to rely upon no longer seems to exist at their hosting provider. This often happens when your provider is purchased or makes a physical move to a new data center. However it comes about, if you are no longer happy with their service, you should begin planning on two levels. The first level should focus on finding a stable provider that will consistently satisfy both your technical requirements and your customer service needs. The second level of planning should look at putting together a migration plan for your website and optimizing its modularity in advance of making any move.
With regard to website optimization, it is important for even small companies to have something of a development methodology that gives you a fighting chance when it comes to needing to move your data to another provider. Unfortunately, there are quite a few firms that develop and then make changes directly to their website without much documentation, making the production site work well until it breaks or is migrated and restored. At that point, people start to ask questions about changes that were made that now appear to be broken. A better approach is to couple configuration management software that lets you check code in and out like a library with a test image that is a mirror of your website that can be run locally on a computer that you own. Companies that can reach that level of sophistication in their website development should have far fewer problems, especially if they develop their own transfer website guide.
Need more Development Privileges or Technology
Some platforms that you use are engineered with the idea that you are using a VPS or a dedicated server to host them. They therefore can require that you have privileges that are not always included with a shared account. They can also ask you to support a programming language or software that your account does not. Either way, if you cannot talk your provider into making an exception for you, you are looking at a situation where you will need to consider making a transfer to a provider that does support the type of technology that you want to use. The most important thing for you to consider at this point is how sold you are on changing your platform technology. It is therefore a good idea to implement what you want to do on a test image and validate that it is what you want so that you do not get trapped in a situation where you make a migration and then decide your new technology is not exactly what you wanted. It is also helpful if your new provider offers a transfer website guide.
Transferring your website can be a pretty smooth experience if you make sure that you know what you are looking for at your new provider and ensure that you have spent some time planning for your migration.
