hi everybody this is Matt Cutts today I
wanted to talk a little bit about how to
move your stuff from one web host to
another web host so maybe you didn't
like the deal that you were getting with
your current guy and you're switching to
a new web host your domain name remains
the same so maybe it's Matt Cutts comm
or example com your domain name is the
same but you're moving to a new IP
address because you're moving to a new
web host so let's talk through the
process of how exactly you do that first
thing you need to know is that there's
this wonderful thing called DNS and DNS
basically stands for domain name server
it Maps a name like example.com
so let's write example.com to an IP
address so when you look up in DNS
something like example.com it says go to
this particular IP address and ask for
it and you will get something back
that's the way everything works life is
good
everybody's happy so what happens when
you want to shift to a different web
host well it's at a different IP address
the content can be the same in fact it
should be the same but now you want to
switch example.com
to point to the new location so here's
what you need to know there's a thing in
DNS called TTL TTL stands for time to
live and it's basically once you've
looked up the IP address for a
particular domain name how long you
cache that so you can typically save it
for a day so if you've looked up
example.com you know the IP address you
don't need to check until the same time
tomorrow however you can in some cases
set the TTL to be much lower so for
example you might want to set it to be
something like five minutes now if you
don't easily find a way to set your TTL
to be low it's not the end of the world
it's just a nice little optimization to
say go ahead and anybody who's checking
in the next five minutes after five
minutes check again so that you can see
how quickly things happen so here's what
you do first if you can set your TTL set
it to be low something like five minutes
now you've got your content so let's
make your content be a happy face maybe
he's got a freckle
now you've got another happy face
because you want to upload the same
content from your old web host to your
new web host and the idea is no matter
which IP address people go to they'll
end up finding your content so in an
ideal world you can have your site
running on both locations if it's static
content it's easy just make a backup
just make a mirror if it's dynamic
content then it's a little bit more
tricky but what you can do is you know
this stuff can happen in a relatively
quick period of time so you could have
the stuff handled via a back-end over
here and it could send stuff to the same
back-end for example but let's just take
the simple case let's take the case
where you've got nothing but some static
content so you've set your time to live
to be low you now have your content on
both sites now's the time to switch over
your DNS setting to point to the new IP
address so we're going to make this
dashed and we're going to make this
solid and what that corresponds to is
now when someone looks up example.com
they're getting the IP address of the
new content so every so often Googlebot
comes along a good rule of thumb is that
we'll try maybe every day to refresh
what Rp what the IP address is for a
particular domain name you can imagine
maybe every 500 fetches of content or
maybe every 1,000 fetches of content so
at least the heuristics used to be in
the old days you know at least once a
day we'd recheck to make sure that the
IP address has changed so you've set
your time to live low you've uploaded
your content to both sites you changed
your DNS to point to the new IP address
now you just want to check that
Googlebot and users and all those people
are finding your content at the new
address if you're set if you set your
time to live to be pretty low within
five or ten minutes you should see
people streaming in on your new website
if your time to live was not set then
probably after a day or so you'll notice
people going over to the new address
various weird browsers can cache in very
strange ways but that's a pretty good
rule of thumb
once you see Googlebot start to come to
the new address you should be in pretty
good shape it doesn't hurt to keep the
content live in both locations just for
a little while but what you'll notice is
the trash
pick bought traffic and people visiting
the site will sort of taper off while on
the new site they sort of ramp up and
once you see that ramped up pretty
nicely happened and you don't see as
many people over here then it's pretty
safe to go ahead and remove this content
off of this IP address so if you're not
happy with your current web post you can
change and it's not the end of the world
it's not that risky you know just
changing your DNS to point to a new IP
address it's something that you know
it's a good exercise for everybody to do
just so you know how things work and if
you make sense if you think about it it
makes sense as far as every so often
they're just checking what the setting
should be and when they find a new
setting they just go to the new location
I hope that helps and good luck
migrating to new IP addresses