If You Move Your Website, How Long will it be Down?

This is a common question I get from a lot of clients. Oddly enough, the question is never “Will my site be down?” but instead “How long will it be down?”  It’s as if it is generally expected that a site has to be down to move it from one place to another.

The answer is, if the site is moved properly there should not be any downtime.

How can you move a site without downtime?

Let’s say you are hosting your website over at Hosting Company A, and you decide to move it to Hosting Company B. How can we ensure a smooth transfer without any downtime?

First, you need to realize that your website is just data. And you can have multiple copies of this data all over the internet if you wanted. Naturally, this would be bad for SEO reasons, but in the case of moving your website if we take an exact duplicate of your site at A and place it at B, then there won’t be any downtime.

To understand why we need to take a look at how domains work at least in layman terms.

So how do people visit your website? They just type your domain name into their browser. That’s about it right? Well there is a lot more going on in the background.

Your domain name is really just kind of a shortcut to your hosting company. There really is a lot that goes on behind the scenes. Your domain name references a batch of ‘records’, these records give a series of addresses for all the elements of your website such as email, website, etc.

If you change the references for your domain name to the new hosting company, and your new hosting company has an exact duplicate of the website, then there is no downtime. People visiting your domain name will just get the new address and start viewing the site on the new system, all in the background without them knowing it.

Does this change happen immediately?

No this change of addresses with your domain does not occur immediately. What happens is that the ‘records’ attached to your domain have a Time To Live or TTL.

A TTL is essentially a timer that tells computers such as your visitors how long to keep an address that they get for your domain. What this does is when you visit a domain the address is pulled in the background and you see the site, but if you visit the site again, and again, and again, a new address isn’t pulled each time. Instead, the address is cached for the amount of time the TTL is set.

When you change the reference of addresses for a domain the industry standard is that the TTL is set to 24 hours. So all computers that pull the addresses for a domain will normally keep them for 24 hours and continue going to the same address on repeat visits during that 24 hour period.

So does this mean that all your visitors will have to wait 24 hours to see the site on the new hosting environment? No, actually that’s not what it means.  Let’s say you have a computer visiting your site that has never visited your site. They don’t have any cached records of your old address so they start going to the new address immediately.

Let’s also pretend one visitor came to your site 10 hours before the move. Now they visit again, they will see the old site again, but do they need to wait 24 hours? No, they will only have to wait 14 hours, because 10 hours of the time has already passed.

Are there any side effects to be concerned with?

As you can see there will not be any downtime associated with your website.  There is a period of time, however, where some visitors are looking at the site on your old hosting, and some visitors are visiting your new hosting.

So the side effects are that if you make changes to your site during this 24 hour period of being in ‘limbo’ you should either make them to both sites if it is really urgent, or at the very least your new hosting, which eventually everyone see.

Another side effect would affect your email in much the same way.  Someone sending you email might hit your old hosting, and someone else might send email and have it go to your new hosting.  It is good practice that for the 24 hours your addressing would be in ‘limbo’, to check both servers for email. (NOTE: This is only if you are also moving email, if you host your email with a third party like Google Apps, that may not change so nothing would affect email delivery)

Are there any situations where downtime might happen?

Of course there are always occasions where downtime might occur, but in these cases I usually cause them myself on purpose. Why would I do this you ask?

Let’s pretend you have a eCommerce site. Your website sells products, services or takes orders of some kind.

If you often go a day without an order, or rarely have more than one or two orders a day, then there really is no worries here. You might have to check the email or the order history on the old hosting just to make sure you don’t miss an order, and if you got an order it may take some manual entry to add it to the new hosting.

However let’s say you get 5-10-20-30 orders a day.  Well now you can see the chance you get a stream of orders on the old hosting environment is much more likely. Manually entering that many orders on the new hosting might not be as easy when there are several.

In this case, what I’ll normally do is make a duplicate of the site.  Then shut down the site on the old hosting. Most eCommerce applications have a way to set the store in “Maintenance Mode” so that visitors will see the site is undergoing maintenance and will return shortly.  On the new hosting however, I’ll leave the site turned on, no maintenance mode.

Now what happens is that anyone using cached old addresses, will see the old hosting, and see the maintenance mode.  Anyone already receiving the new address, will see the site live and will be able to purchase your items.

In this case there really isn’t any downtime, you are just preventing people from ordering on the old hosting so that you can ensure you aren’t missing orders, or have to double enter orders into the new hosting. There are methods to ensure that even this doesn’t happen, if you have a talented developer on your side.

Where can I get help?

If you need help with moving a website from one hosting company to another, you can contact me or even visit my services based website at http://www.turbowebs.com/