If you own/manage a website, it is inevitable that you will have to change your web host one day. It could be due to the poor services of your current host, or that your site traffic exploded and you need to move on to a bigger host to accommodate the traffic. Whatever the case, most people will agree that it is never a joyous event to switch server. Your site will be down/unstable/inaccessible during the migration period and it could potentially lead to loss of sales. In this article, we are going to show you how you can migrate your site to a new server effortlessly and without any (or minimal) downtime.

There are two main type of web hosting: Shared hosting and VPS/Dedicated hosting. Shared hosting means that the site is hosted in a shared environment and share the same IP address as hundreds (or even thousands) other sites. In shared hosting, the administrative control given to the user is usually very limited, so there is practically no way to manipulate the DNS feature. On the other hand, VPS/dedicated hosting gives the users absolute control over their servers and they can play around with the DNS feature to reduce the downtime. Let’s take a look below at how we can reduce the downtime for these two hosting environments.
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