Moving/Relocating websites - Difficulties and implications

ianhobo

Hi,
I have been asked by a friend/ex employer to help relocate some of the companies websites.
All the sites are tourism related (specific to ireland), but the companies who originally designed the sites decided to host them on foreign servers. Two in the uk, and one (the main one) in America.

Given SEO trends, I feel it would be better to have the sites hosted on Irish servers as the site content is specific to Ireland (any opinions?)

I would like to purchase a corporate hosting solution and upload copies of the site. I will mostly likely go with Blacknight.
My difficulty lies within the DNS, what is the best approach to deal with it? Will the search engine results dive bomb? The sites currently rank quite well with hundreds/thousands of visits per day/weeks, so I don't want to mess that up as that would defeat the whole purpose of relocating the sites to irish servers and centralising the content.

Is there a preferred method to do this correctly - either temporary/permanment re-directs, or just change the DNS outright

Any help much appreciated.

Sorry, I should mention, two of the websites are currently operated by a webdesign company who will change the domains on my behalf, the other would be a domain transfer through the "normal" channels

Thanks

mneylon

As long as the websites are setup the same way ie. page locations etc., there's no reason why you would have any major issues.

ianhobo

wow, ok. thats great.
thanks for that Blacknight.

There wouldn't be any structure/hierarchy changes to the websites, just simply copying from one server to another

I just assumed that with the ip's and geographical server locations changing, that it might cause temporary trouble.

Thanks again

tricky D

Note that while the DNS is updated, your site will be unreachable. Basically, it takes a while for all the 'addressbooks' to get updated. Some get updated quicker than others. Normally takes around 24 hours so if your site is busy, try to pick a time with low traffic to make your change e.g. Sunday evening.

hth
\r

mneylon

tricky D wrote: »

Note that while the DNS is updated, your site will be unreachable.
\r

That would only happen if the current provider disabled their hosting account.

Otherwise people would see the old site until they started seeing the new site

Teh Russ

If the websites are static (ie, straight HTML), you shouldn't have any issues. On the other hand, if they're dynamic, you'll probably have to change things like database connection strings, plus you'll have to check that your new server is running similar versions of PHP/MySQL/SQL Server/.NET/whatever to your old server, otherwise this could mean having to make some significant changes to the back-end code of your website.

wheres me jumpa

Will the mail records change? i.e. is mail to be hosted with Blacknight now? If so you will have to check the old location for mail that arrived there while the nameserver change was propagating.

tricky D

blacknight wrote: »

That would only happen if the current provider disabled their hosting account.

Otherwise people would see the old site until they started seeing the new site

Quite right. I should have been referring to the 'Joe in London can see the new site/content, why can't I in Dublin?' scenario.