Changing Web Hosts

From SuperbHosting.net Support Wiki

Whether you are moving to Superb because of poor service, bad support or purely for financial reasons, there are a number of things that must be taken into account when switching web hosts.

Step 1: Choosing the right Superb web hosting plan

You have ordered the appropriate Superb hosting plan for your needs. The first part of this decision is choosing between Superb and Superb Enterprise. Superb Enterprise offers premier support and personal customization for your needs. Once you have made this decision, you need to choose the correct web hosting plan, based on disk space, traffic, number of email accounts, e-commerce requirements, and so forth.

Step 2: Backing up or copying your web site

Note that we cannot transfer your site from your old hosts to Superb. You must back up your site to your own computer. Once you have backed up your web site from your other web host do not tell them that you are moving (read below for reasons why). You will want to maintain your old site until you are sure the new site works fine.

Step 3: Uploading your web site to Superb

Once you have received confirmation from our New Account Setup department that your account has been set up, you can log in to your account to upload your web site onto your Superb server.

To log in to your account to upload your files, you need to have FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software on your local computer. See our support documentation for details.

Once you have uploaded your website onto Superb test all links, etc. exhaustively before going to Step 4.

Please note that if your links are absolute, (i.e. include your domain name), they will go back to your old site; you should make your links relative, (i.e. link to pagename.html instead of http://www.yourdomain.tld/pagename.html)

Step 4: Changing your DNS

You will need to change your DNS over to Superb Internet.

Please note that you have 2 options available at this point:

1. Select Superb as your new Domain Name Registrar
2. Stay with your current registrar and change the DNS records of your domain

It is recommended that you first change your Domain Name registration over to Superb. To do this, you sign up for a separate account at Superb Registrar and do a "Domain Transfer".

To change your DNS, you will need to go to your domain name registrar to have your domain redirected from the current nameservers. You do this by logging in online with your account at your registrar and accessing a "domain manager", "domain administrator", or something similar. Within such a section, you will find an option to change the domain name servers for your domain. Please note that this is different from registering a DNS server. If you do not know your registrar's name, then do a WHOIS to determine this.

You will need to provide the following names servers for Superb. Please note that not all registrars require the IP address:

• NS1.SUPERB.NET - 207.228.225.5
• NS3.SUPERB.NET - 207.228.226.5

During the transition, it is advisable that you duplicate your web site identically over to Superb. If you want to make any changes or updates to your website, it is advisable to wait until after you make the move over and your site is running smoothly.

Step 5: Moving your email

Once the change in your domain registration record comes into effect, e-mails sent to your domain should be going to the your new email accounts at Superb. However, some may still be trickling to the old account so you may need to check both accounts for e-mail during this transitional period. To ensure no mail is lost in this period, be sure to set up your email accounts at Superb before doing the DNS/registrar change. Note that there is a "catch-22" with this, as the Email Administration page in myCP will not work until your DNS change has propagated to our name servers. For this purpose we have a temporary URL that you can enter into your browser to set up Email Accounts before doing the DNS change. Please submit a support ticket to find out what this URL is for your account.

Step 6: Terminating your old web hosting account

After waiting about a week to ensure that your new site is running smoothly and DNS propagation has occurred everywhere, terminate your old web hosting account.