Leaving your web host doesn't have to be risky and worrying

My first interactions with a client can be very telling. It is often during this time that I can dispel many technology myths they have been told, and one of the most common is that it is impossible or very difficult for them to leave their hosting company.

Firstly, why would you ever want to leave your host? Many of the sites which we rescue from errant hosts were created by developers with limited expertise who host the websites they build as an afterthought. Although the graphic design work may be superficially good, I often find huge disparity between that and the actual software design. It can be as though the developer failed to approach the work from either the top-down or the bottom-up and instead laboriously manufactured each page, duplicating hundreds of lines of non-standards-compliant code and creating a maintainability nightmare. There is every chance in this case that their approach to the niceties of hosting will be just as haphazard. DNS, domain records, HTTP, system administration and URL rewriting are complex subjects and several books could be written about each one. Even selecting a suitable host for the project requires discernment and a deep knowledge of the technologies involved which is often lacked by the jobbing designer. It doesn't matter how good the host might be (and our fully-managed hosting partners are no exception) the developer must be able to communicate his needs to the host in a precise and technical manner in order to proceed with custom development or to diagnose and resolve problems with a website.

It should be clearer why hosting ought to be left to the experts. But how to move? The fact is that a casual web designer working on his or her own has probably not tied the client into a fixed term of hosting. Yes, he or she may have requested and received an up-front payment for the year, but if the hosting service offered is poor it is almost always worth forfeiting this fee to obtain better support and expert further development of the site. Here are some guidelines for the moving-away procedure.

1. Contact us! We're always happy to discuss your particular needs in detail and depth, and help you see a way forward.
2. Permit us to investigate the site. Tell us what level of access you have to the content.
3. Let us draw up a specification detailing the cost of the required work.
4. We will extract the site content, mirror the site on to our development server to allow us to analyze it more closely and start to either build you a new site or convert the current design into something which is acceptable and a good staging platform for further development.
5. We'll take you through the new site. It may look like your old one if that's what you wanted, but we will have added features - probably a subsystem to allow you to edit the content directly through the site, or a database back-end which allows you to store your business information in a more manageable and consistent way. It will also comply with agreed web standards and will have been massaged into a dynamic system which will permit site-wide changes in seconds, rather than days.
6. Request that your current host change their IPS tag. We'll give you the information you need to make that request when the time comes.
7. Now that we have control of the domain, we can carefully rescue your old e-mail and display the new site.
8. When you're happy, and when DNS has had time to propagate, you can close your old hosting account, safe in the knowledge that Kohera has the site under control and properly supported.
9. We'll then contact you and start to talk about how the future development should be completed. You get to realize the dreams you've always had for the site.
10. Search Engine Optimisation becomes possible, Traffic increases, customer communication improves, questions are answered.

Remember that the Nominet guidelines state that a host may not refuse to release a domain name if the client's bills are paid up-to-date. If you encounter resistance, we can negotiate directly with the host on your behalf.

An important point: Do not speak to your host before you've spoken to us! Some providers can get difficult and close your account, pulling the plug before we've had a chance to rescue your high-quality site content. Others will retain your domain permanently or allow it to expire unless it is transferred properly. Be aware!