Foreign Perspectives

I’ve been moving my domains away from their previous host and now have all the easy ones moved over.

Stage two is starting as you read this and involves re-registering the domains with the new registrar.

The snag is that there’s obviously a period when things are in limbo between the two so the idea is to reduce the extent of that as far as possible. You can pretty much eliminate that limbo stage if you take care in the move and do it in three parts.

1. setup the domain on the new hosting service and load all the HTML, databases and whatnot (add a little note to yourself on the homepage of the domain to the effect that it’s on the new host);
2. login to the old registrar and set the name servers to point to the new host;
3. initiate the domain transfer to the new registrar and setup the nameservers to point to the new host.

If you follow the three steps, the transfer should be seamless which is why in step one it’s handy to add a note to the homepage so that you know the transfer has happened.

I say, “should be” seamless because, of course, chances are that the software on the new hosting service isn’t exactly the same as on the old one. Typically, I get caught out by my use of globals in PHP and I nearly always forget to set the relevant option which has somewhat peculiar effects on the sites. To avoid this, it’s best to have a test domain which you can try out on the new host before moving over the live sites.