So many times hosting companies disappoint their clients up to the point that they want to switch to another company. But the result of that switch can be so disastrous, as the client may end up being offline for many days or even weeks. Switching your hosting company without going offline is very simple but has to be done very carefully.

There might be so many other ways that one can switch from one host to another, but the suggestion below is what I tested so many times and proves very efficient.

1. Before switching, first sign up with another hosting company, some hosting companies provides the option to just host your domain, i.e. you don't need to register or transfer an existing domain, while some companies give free domain as part of their packages and you must choose a domain, so if must choose domain to proceed you can register a new domain which is similar to yours e.g. if you have nairaland.com you can choose to register nairaland.+net with the package or choose the transfer option. Otherwise just sign up for a hosting account without any domain name.

2. After your new account becomes active, download all the files in your old account and upload them to the new account, DO NOT DELETE your files in the old account, make sure everything in the old account remains intact.

3. Use PhpMyAdmin or another MySQL manager to export the database in your old account and Import it to your new account do not change anything.

4. Now, this is the trickiest part and where most people get lost and jump in to downtime, DO NOT Switch your Nameserver (NS) to your new hosting account yet, run the website located in your new account and make sure it is running properly, you can run the website from the root using IP address and directories the website is located in.

5. If you are 100% sure your website is active on the new hosting account, then now you can change the Nameservers to that of your new hosting account, but again DO NOT DELETE your files in the old account, make sure everything in the old account remains intact.

6. Allow like 24 hours after changing the nameservers, then make some changes in the new hosting account, a change can be anything, from changing a color to adding something like "We have moved to a new hosting company". Run the website and see if the changes you made appeared. If it appears, then you can safely delete your files from the old hosting account.

All the above is done without even 1 minute downtime, your website visitors will not even noticed anything that happened unless of course if you informed them that you have moved.

I hope this will help some webmasters, especially those jumping from one hosting company to another looking for a better service.

You can also use uc browser(udisk)