How to Switch Web Hosts Without Downtime

First, take a full backup you control: site files, database dumps, and — separately — every email mailbox if mail lives at your host. Download them to your own machine; a backup that only exists inside the account you're leaving isn't a backup.

Second, inventory what actually runs the site: PHP version, cron jobs, redirects, SSL certificates, and any email addresses on the domain. The migration failures that surface a week later are almost always something missing from this list.

Third, buy the new hosting before cancelling the old — you need both accounts alive simultaneously. The overlap costs a few dollars; skipping it is how sites go dark for days.

Restore your site on the new host and test it before DNS changes, using the host's temporary/staging URL or a hosts-file override on your own machine. Click through forms, logins, and checkout — not just the homepage.

A day before the switch, lower your domain's DNS TTL (the record cache time) to around 300 seconds so the change propagates in minutes instead of days. This is the single highest-leverage step in the whole process, and the most skipped.

Then switch the DNS records during your lowest-traffic hour, watch both hosts' access logs, and confirm traffic drains to the new server. With a low TTL, the overlap window where some visitors still hit the old host is minutes long — which is why the old site must stay up and unchanged through the cutover.

If your email runs on the old host, migrating the website silently schedules a mail outage: when DNS moves, mail delivery follows the new MX records immediately, but your mailboxes don't move themselves. Either migrate mailboxes first (IMAP copy), or — our standing recommendation — use the move to separate email from web hosting entirely, so the next hosting switch never touches your inbox again.

Finally: keep the old account for two weeks after cutover. Stragglers with cached DNS, a forgotten cron job, a subdomain nobody remembered — the overlap fortnight is when you find them for free instead of after the account is deleted.