How to move your hosting without a single outage

You switch DNS at 10 p.m. By 10:05, half your customers see the new site and half see the old one, and that night's email lands on a server nobody checks anymore. None of that is a technical failure: it's a problem of order. This guide gives you that order, step by step, to move website and email without anyone noticing.

1. Take inventory before touching anything

Write down everything that lives on your current hosting, not just the website:

Site files and databases.
Email accounts, forwarders and lists.
DNS records: A, CNAME, MX, TXT (SPF, DKIM, Google or Microsoft verifications).
Scheduled tasks (cron), SSL certificates and subdomains.

TXT records are the ones most often forgotten, and without them email starts landing in spam or an integration quietly stops working.

2. Lower the TTL a day ahead

$ dig yourcompany.com +noall +answer
yourcompany.com.   86400   IN   A   198.51.100.20

That 86400 is the TTL: how many seconds other servers keep your address in memory. 86,400 seconds is 24 hours, so a DNS change could take a full day to be seen everywhere. Lower it to 300 (5 minutes) at least 24 hours before the migration; when you switch DNS, traffic will move almost immediately.

3. Copy and test on the new server

Upload the files, import the database and check that the PHP version and extensions match the old server. To test without changing DNS, edit your computer's hosts file and point your domain to the new IP: you'll see the site on the new server while everyone else still sees the old one.

# Windows: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
# macOS / Linux: /etc/hosts
203.0.113.10   yourcompany.com   www.yourcompany.com

Remove that line when you're done testing; if you forget it, your computer keeps seeing the new server even if something breaks in DNS, and you won't notice.

Check forms, logins, payments and anything that sends email. It's far easier to fix things now than with real visitors.

4. Email deserves its own plan

Emails that arrive while DNS is switching can land on either server. If email is moving too, create the same accounts on the new server and copy the mailboxes over IMAP before the switch. After the DNS change, run a second sync to bring over messages that arrived during the transition. That way nobody loses an email.

5. Switch DNS at a quiet hour

Pick the time with the least traffic, which for most businesses is at night or on the weekend. Update the records, confirm with a DNS lookup tool that they return the new IP, and check that the SSL certificate was issued correctly.

6. Don't shut down the old server yet

Keep the previous hosting active for at least 72 hours. Some internet providers ignore the TTL and keep sending visitors to the old IP for a while. Once you confirm it no longer receives traffic or email, you can cancel it.

Quick checklist

Inventory of site, email and DNS.
TTL at 300 seconds, 24 hours before.
Copy and test using the hosts file.
Mailbox migration over IMAP.
DNS switch during low traffic.
Old server active for 72 more hours.

If you're moving your site to our hosting, we can take care of the whole list: inventory, copy, testing, DNS switch and follow-up on the old server. You just tell us when.

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