It is not something new that there are many people around us who raise the issue of switching to another web host or IP address being devoid of any sort of hiccups in Google. In this article, the experience of moving mattcutts.com from one IP to another IP just with the aid of altering the host is elucidated. It’s easier to accomplish having a static website than a dynamic website. The idea doesn’t vary but it is better if you can spend a day while your website can swing between 2 IP addresses. Some steps are there.

Step 1: Sign up with a good web host provider

You can do some research work or follow some references to find a good web host for yourself. I preferred by present web host (csoft.net), which I selected after research, and I also found that the readership of the site was growing beyond my expectation. A non-SEO friend of mine used pair.com. Let me refer to the example using IP addresses. If we move from csoft.com to pair.com, the IP would change from 63.x.x.x to 65.x.x.x. DNS is a system used for mapping websites to the IP address which a machine uses, like, say, 61.115.6.132.

Step 2: The aspect of Creating a backup of your website on the new web host

You are just in need of copying the whole file to the new web host with a static website. On the contrary, a blog engages MySQL for the purpose of storage of posts and it makes the process a bit difficult. It is quite possible to find some e-commerce sites where the database is always synced and if it happens, you are probably in need of setting up a copy of the database between the old and new location at the time of transition.

Well, here, an instance is given of a WordPress blog that makes use of MySQL database and can come up with a bit of problem for some hours. Just imagine that you have made use of FTP in order to copy the static files from one web host to other. A new MySQL database has to be created now. The same username and database name might work but if it doesn’t, you are in need of putting the WordPress wp-config.php on the new location with a view to update the username, database name, and other relevant things.

You now have a new SQL database so that you can get away with the old one, copy it to the new one, and then load the database there.

Keep in mind that you not only have a username and a password for both the web hosts, but different usernames and passwords for the database at every single location. You may also have the MySQL database stored on a unique location, which is the reason I showed the host option while database restoration. Also, if the new host has a unique option for the database, you will be required to edit the wp-config.php file, else WordPress will be unable to access the database on your new host.

You have similar copies of your website at 2 locations. If your blog is just updated with a couple of comments daily, it’s not a big issue if a comment is posted or if someone changes your database during the period when the transition is taking place. But if your site is huge and based on e-Commerce, then you will need to work hard to keep both the databases synchronized.

Step 3: Changing the DNS to point to the new web host

One needs to have an acquaintance with the term DNS because it’s of paramount significance. Your IP address is indispensable for any agent striving to get to your site-be it Googlebot or anybody else. Rechecking the IP address after 500 fetches in order to determine the authenticity or making sure if some hours have gone are common factors. TTL (Time to Live), calculated in seconds, does have an impact if you have DNS-enabled browsers. It states that your fetched IP address is going to be safe for ‘x’ seconds and for this much time, the address can be stored. The browser is expected to proceed very slowly simply because the IP address is meant for everything on each webpage of your site.

For DNS, TTL assumes a significant role. A couple of websites like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. have pretty short DNS TTL setting of about 300-900 seconds. This is because if you have many data centers, you would like to take one of them down to enable the data center mechanics to provide good data to the machines. If you have a short TTL, you would be able to pull the IP address of a data center out of the rotation in merely a couple of minutes.

The ‘Google Dance’ phenomenon lasted for about a week and would show the old as well as the new results depending on the data center which the user hit. This is because every data center was taken down and brought back up after loading with new data. T needed many days to switch the data to all the centers. Webmasters checked out www2.google.com or www3.google.com as they led them to the latest data centers. Today, the production system is better equipped to switch these things in much less time.

Step 4: Wait while the DNS change is propagated through the internet

Basically, this is a TTL function, and is based on whether you are actually switching to those name servers which are present in the DNS currently. Keep in mind that DNS is hierarchical, and it will take time for the DNS caches to be flushes as the TTL is exceeded. This switch, which cakes place at the root of DNS, would be quicker only if you use a smart registrar and a known set of the new name servers. The ‘dig+trace domain’ can be used in UNIX and Linux for verifying hat the new name server is present on the root server.

Step 5: You are almost done with your task when you are sure that Googlebot is fetching from the new web host and the IP address. In such a case, the old website can be shut down.

With the aid of your domain, your IP address can be verified. Make yourself familiar with the proceedings and remember that the new visitors should be endowed with the new IP address, whereas, it is possible for the previous visitors to employ the old IP address from their DNS store. Permitting a couple of days is recommended because it is possible for some people to possess long TTL set, although, these are mostly meant for a day or even less. So, get rid of hosting on the old location after a day. In order to have an infallible verification on this, test your logs and it is perfect if your log doesn’t show any previous visitors.

About the author: Gregory Trune is a professional blogger in the web hosting industry. Visit WebHostingMadness.com to read his reviews on the top 10 hosting companies this year.