The Art of SEO

Changing Servers

Sometimes you may decide you want to move servers without changing your domain name or any of your URLs. A common cause of this is that the growth of your traffic requires you to move up in terms of hosting environment. If you are using third-party hosting, perhaps you are changing your hosting company. If you have your own data center, you may need to move or expand your facilities, resulting in a change in the IP addresses of your servers.

This is normally a straightforward process: simply go to the registrar where you registered the domain name and update the DNS records to point to the new server location. You can also temporarily decrease the site’s DNS Time to Live (TTL) to five minutes (or something similar) to make the move take place faster. For the most part, you should be done, though you should follow the monitoring recommendations we will outline shortly.

Even if you follow this process, certain types of problems can arise anyway. Here are the most common ones:

• You may have content that can’t function on the new platform. A simple example of this might be that you use Perl in implementing your site, and Perl is not installed on the new server. This can happen for other reasons, and these can result in pages that return 404 or 500 errors, instead of the content you intended.

• Unfortunately, publishers commonly forget to move key content or files over, such as robots.txt, analytics files, sitemaps.xml, the .htaccess file, and so forth. The first tip, of course, ...