Migrating Your Hosting During Website Downtime

Your web host’s servers have gone down and you’re facing that dreaded website downtime. What do you do? If your host isn’t giving you an estimate as to when your site will be up and running, it’s time to consider migration. In a past post we talked about migrating your website to weather the downtime storm. In this post we’ll talk about exactly how you can do it.

Goal Number One

Your goal right now is to have two hosting companies. Your secondary hosting plan does not have to be an expensive one and the investment is well worth the ability to migrate and avoid downtime. When choosing your secondary hosting provider, you need to make sure that they aren’t just an extension of your current hosting provider. If they are, the migration won’t do you any good. You need a second web host that stands completely separate from your current hosting provider.

Once You Have Two Hosting Providers

Now you have two hosting providers. You’re no longer at the mercy of your hosting company’s downtime. When downtime does occur, it’s time to migrate your entire site from your old host to your backup host. You’ll need to prepare for this, however, by having a copy of all of your site’s files stored on a secure drive. You’ll want to maintain the same file and folder structure so that the files are ready for upload to the secondary host when needed. Better yet, you can have a copy of your site already uploaded to your secondary hosting provider so it’s ready to go when necessary.

Making Your Secondary Host Live

When downtime hits and your hosting provider isn’t being responsive, it’s time to address your domain name’s DNS settings. During a period of downtime, you don’t want your domain name pointing to the site where the server is having downtime issues. You want the DNS to point to your secondary web host. Go to the company where you have your domain name registered and enter the DNS settings of your secondary web host. Your domain name will now be pointing at your secondary hosting account and you will be avoiding the downtime that other customers of your primary web host are experiencing.

Doesn’t It Take 48 Hours for a DNS Change to Complete?

Yes and no. It can take up to 48 hours for a DNS change to complete depending on the DNS service that you use. This is why you want to work with a DNS service that has a lower TTL (time to live) period. Disaster recovery has become a priority in today’s day and age and you can put this to work for you by finding a DNS service that has a 300 second TTL. This means it will only take 300 seconds for your new DNS settings to become effective. If you’re not sure how long your DNS provider’s TTL is, ask them. If it’s more than an hour, look elsewhere for services so you can be sure that you can migrate your site quickly and efficiently when you need to.