I'm ready to convert my site to a production site. I figure I need the customer to open a new Winhost account, and ask for transfer of Domain Name. I'm all good when my client receives his welcome kit, and forwards it to me. Where I get fuzzy is how to time the conversion. Can we ask for a specific transfer time/date? Is there a document with steps to follow on this topic? Thanks much, Jack Webb
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "time of conversion"? But if you are migrating from one hosting company to Winhost, and you want to reduce the down time here is what you will need to do. Go to your Winhost account and create all the POP accounts you will need. Upload the web pages to your Winhost account. Use the secondary URL to pull up the site and test it out. Make sure everything works. From there you will contact your old hosting company and ask them to update the name servers on the domain name to point to... ns1.Winhost.com ns2.Winhost.com ns3.Winhost.com Keep your old hosting provider open for at least 5 days. When you update the name servers, it may not propagate through out the Internet immediately. Keeping both hosting accounts open, will guarantee that if someone try's to pull up your web site or send you an email, it will either arrive on our system or go to your old hosting provider. Once you are sure that all calls are being routed to your Winhost account that is the time you can close your account with your old hosting provider.
Yes, I believe you hit it on the mark. Time of conversion is when users goto wwww.oldsite.org which is hosted by Hostmysite.com, and end up at www.newsite.org hosted at Winhost.com I don't want users ending up at the old site and creating new data there, once we convert.
Then their is really not much we can do. DNS caching is part of the Internet and there will be some down time if you close your old hosting account before DNS caching is cleared through out the Internet.
Migrating a site that uses a database to a new host is tricky. To be safe you have to take down the old host, then change the name servers for the domain to point to the new host. And of course that means some down time until DNS propagates the new name serer information. It's easy for a site with no customer-entered data - you just leave them both up while the DNS changes propagate. But for a database-dependent site you have to either temporarily disable the ability for users to enter data at the old host or take the site down. No easy way around that I'm afraid.
