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Transferring your website from one host to another can be an expensive and time-consuming job and many people put up with awful hosting services for the fear of getting into a mess. You might be looking for a change in hosting due to variety of reasons. You might not be getting the required technical support, or you might have got a better deal with new features. Whatever be the reason, there is no need to fear that you might lose your existing customers if the site is down for sometime. All this is passe in the current scenario. You can very well migrate to your preferred hosting service with almost no downtime and if you take the advice of the experts, the transfer would be fast and safe without losing any crucial data.

In this article I’ll try to explain the easiest way to transfer your website from one web hosting company to another using cPanel (Control panel that almost every web hosting company uses). I’m not going into details, I’ll try to keep it short and simple.

There are five easy steps to transfer your website from one web hosting to another.

Step 1: Sign up for a new web hosting package. This should be done before you cancel your old hosting account.

Step 2: You need to now download your entire old site using a FTP program or a cPanel backup utility.

You can download the just the home directory backup separately from MySQL database backup, you can also generate a full website backup with the website files and database in one package.

Then you need to upload your entire website to the new hosting using the cPanel backup utility again.

Step 3: After you have moved all your files to the new account, you will need to change your domain name’s name servers. You can use a temporary address at your new web host to make sure everything is working fine before you go ahead and update your name servers. Then you have to go to the domain registrar and update the name servers. You have to update the name servers to the new name servers that your host emailed to you when you signed up.

Step 4: After 24-72 hours, your domain would be fully propagated and would be pointing to your new web hosting address. At this stage, it is best to test again whether all the services such as emails are working fine. Once you are satisfied, proceed to the next step.

Step 5: You can now easily cancel your account with your old hosting provider as your site would be up and running on your new account.

Some of the web hosting companies are offering free trasfer of your websites to their hosting, so if you have difficulties with the steps above or you don’t want to waste your time, you can choos that kind of company. If you have doubts about which copany to choose you can read our article “How to choose the best hosting provider“