Moving site from one host to another host

Customer Support Customer Only Discussion
1
  • Let’s say you have mydomain.com at host 1.
  • You have mydomain.net at host 2 which will eventually become your newer enhanced version of mydomain.com which is still active at host 1
  • The day comes to make the switch and you make the changes at the registrar so that mydomain.com now uses the name servers at host 2.
  • You have also setup an alias to mydomain.net at host 2 which is mydomain.com.
  • Now all you have to do is wait for propegation, but you would like to redirect any left over traffic to the mydomain.net site until full propegation has completed.

  1. What would I do? I really don’t care too much about search engines in this one case, but if I wanted to do a 301 redirect could I do it on the windows server? If not what is the recommended method? I realize that after the propogation period takes place it won’t really matter any more as I will kill that site.

  2. Also since my main site (let’s say I did care about search engines) mydomain.com is now an alias to mydomain.net does that cause any issues for search engines? Is there a way to reverse it at host 2 so that mydomain.com becomes the main and mydomain.net becomes the alias without a lot of work?

Thank you for your time.

Greg

2

Re. “but you would like to redirect any left over traffic to the mydomain.net site until full propegation has completed.”

Once you’ve changed the nameservers, the person who has typed in the website address of the original site is at the mercy of the DNS “lookup” of their Internet access ISP. Put simply, if their ISP is using an older copy of DNS records (which may be cached for up to a couple of days) then the visitor will be directed to your old website’s IP address, and show the old website assuming you haven’t removed it. If their ISP is using the latest copy of DNS records then they’ll be shown your new site.

There’s never any “left over traffic” - it’s either directed to the old site or the new site; once you’ve changed the nameserver settings you’re at the mercy of how often each user’s ISP updates their name server records.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Moley

P.S. it’s ‘propagate’ :slight_smile: