I have a question I hope someone can help me with. I am wanting to change my webhost for my website. Has anyone done this and how difficult is it? What is required? Actually I don't have a foggy clue where to start in order to do this. The host I have now is too limited for me. It only uses FTP, no SQL or PHP. Any suggestions on who would be a good webhost to change to? Thanks for any help you can give me. Toto2

I use BlueHost and it is good. I think I would go to the potential new host and see if they have a section you could read on how to transfer to them. Just an idea...

ali

Thanks Ali for the suggestion. I am talking with BlueHost and they seem to have good support for transfering a website. They certainly have more what I need than my current hosting service. Now to see if I can actually get it done. TY JB

What program or software did you use to create your website? Also, if you want to save some time - you could pay someone $5 or 10.00 to do the transfer for you (on scriptlance).

Thanks Holly. I have no idea what software or program as it is one of those sites that don't require much tech knowledge to set it up. I have a few other websits I am working on and since this one is pretty well set up. I guess my best bet is to work on these other sites and not spend much time for now worrying about this one. I do wonder how long it is going to take me to get efficient, proficient on doing these jobs. Right now I have to be figure it out myself, as I can't afford to outsource much at the present. I do appreciate your input. Thanks again, JB

Changing to a new host is not too difficult if you just have plain HTML pages and have your email through something other than the domain name you use. Follow these steps:

1. Sign up for the new host (we'll call them newhost.com) plan.
2. FTP in to your current host (we'll call them oldhost.com) and download all of your web files (if you don't already have them on your hard drive). Open up the home page file and make a small change to it (add some text, something that you will notice)
3. Your new host should have given you an address to upload your files to - FTP in and upload your files to them.
4. Your new host should have also sent you nameserver information (something like ns1.newhost.com). Make a note of these - there should be at least two addresses for the nameservers.
5. Go to your domain registrar (wherever you registered the domain name) and login. Change your Nameserver information from the oldhost.com name servers to the newhost.com name servers.
6. Give it about 48 hours for the nameserver change to propagate (this time varies, depending on the mood of the internet)
7. Go to your domain name in the browser. Do you see the changes you added to the page in step 2? If so, you are good to go. If not, wait another day or so. If you wait more than 4 days and don't see the changes, log in to your registrar's site to make sure the changes took without error.
8. That's it! Delete the files off of the oldhost.com site and cancel your account!

Please note that this is the simplest way - there are additional steps if you have email through yourdomain.com (and not Gmail or Hotmail...something that isn't tied in with your domain) or have a database driven website (like a Wordpress blog or a Joomla site).

I hope this helps! Let me know if I can be of further assistance.