In many cases, a website can be migrated with little or no visible downtime.
The usual approach is to copy the website to the new hosting account while the existing site remains live. Once the copied site has been checked, the domain can be pointed to the new hosting.
There are a few things that can affect this:
- DNS changes can take time to update.
- Ecommerce sites may receive new orders during the move.
- Forums, membership sites or busy blogs may receive new content during the move.
- Email may need separate planning if it uses the same domain.
For sites where new data is being added all the time, we may recommend a short maintenance window or a final database sync before the DNS change.
If you are planning a migration, contact support and tell us how the site is used. We can advise on the safest approach.