shared hosting – PHP Web FTP

The choices you have to make regarding hosting your website, obviously include the web hosting company, however, beyond making that decision, you also need to determine which sort of hosting you require. The reason for this is that your website’s size, its complexity, its popularity in terms of visitor numbers, what functions it has, and the type of business the website represents will all influence what is the most appropriate type of hosting for your website.

In the main there 5 types of web hosting that should cover the vast majority of websites in the sense that one of them will be suitable. Not all hosting companies will offer all 5 of these and it might be the case that they only offer two or three. You also need to factor in the possibility or even the likelihood that your business grows and as such, you need to expand your website.

At that point, the type of hosting most suited to it may need to change, and if the most suitable type is not offered by your current hosting provider then you have the task of choosing a new one and migrating your website over to them. For this reason, it may be wise to select a web hosting service that provides the hosting types that will allow you to expand. As for those 5 web hosting options, here they are…

Shared Hosting

This is the most popular and cheapest hosting option which usually suits the vast majority of websites. With shared hosting, all files for your website are stored on a server that also stores the files of other websites. Your website will also share bandwidth with other websites too. This can mean that even if your hosting plan offers you ‘unlimited’ bandwidth if there is a lot of traffic visiting the other websites on the same server as yours, it can cause your website’s speed to fall.

There can come a point in the development and expansion of your website where you need to migrate it. The reason could be to move it from a shared hosting to a VPS, a dedicated server, or to a new web hosting company altogether. With any website migration, there are risks, especially if a specific set of steps are not followed in order.

These risks include the website no longer functioning properly, missing elements, a loss of data, poor website performance, and it can even cause your website to no longer be indexed by the search engines and therefore lose its rankings. In order to ensure none of the previous risks manifest themselves into reality here are the 10 steps you should follow when migrating your website between hosting companies.

#1: Retain Your Existing Website…For Now: This first one is not actually a step but a definite ‘DO NOT’, which is under no circumstances should you take down your existing website from its current hosting until it is properly migrated and tested as being 100% operational on its new hosting.

#2: Create A Copy Of Your Website: You next need to create a copy of your current website and upload it to your new hosting account. One point here that as you are keeping your current site live, you will initially need to upload the new one to a subdomain as the same domain cannot exist for two separate websites, even if they are identical.