Swtiching Domain Hosting companies - avoiding down time?

MrGuvernment

MrGuvernment

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Joined
Aug 3, 2004
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Hello my Inet guru people!

have a situation.


We are moving out main domain out of networksolutions to another host (many various reasons, beside them redirecting under construction domains to their own person search pages to generate revenue with out permission)

The issue is, when you move domain hosts, your website and email service may not work.. due to the move / transfer for DNS info.

Is there anyway to avoid this down time while the domain is moved?

Networksolution's says it can take UPTO 10 days to complete a domain move, and we did it already with some sites we have, and of course now that the move has started, and we cant access the domain on networksolutions site to edit anything they have it directing to one of their search landing pages!!! (********, our lwayers are already looking into legal action)

But our emails service was on and off, and the website not accessible and still isnt.


So, is there anything that can be done to eliminate / minimize down time during a domain transfer?
 
The previous DNS settings should stay intact so most people would never have any downtime. But it's currently pointing to their DNS I guess you'll have to wait till it's with new registrar before you can change it.
 
Seems as soon as the domain left NS, they redirected it to their own page, and the new host hasn't completed the transfer yet, so i guess both have some blame to take for not doing what they should.
 
If you use your own DNS servers then you shouldn't see any downtime as long as you put those same DNS servers in on the new registrar. I've moved hundreds of domains and I've never had downtime doing it this way.
 
Most hosts will let you keep your e-mail and website up during the changeover...so those people out there on the internet using ISPs with slower DNS servers...they'll be looking in the old location, or sending mail to the old location (if your're doing POP3 or SMTP smart hosting)...still not a problem.

Do the cutover on a late Friday, by Monday most of the dust has settled.
 
Heres what I tell all of our customers

Order your new hosting from the new provider, get EVERYTHING set up, e-mail accounts, website etc. In your e-mail client set up e-mail accounts using the IP of the new server for the pop3 and smtp server names. Do all of this before you update your name servers of course.

Once this is all in place update your name servers, during DNS propagation some people will be hitting the site on the old server, some on the new. Keep your account with netsol active for a couple of weeks.

The point of having two e-mail accounts set up in your e-mail client, one using the IP of the new server and one using the normal hostnames for pop and smtp is to make sure you dont lose any mail, since that also relies on DNS propagation, run like that for a couple of weeks then you can simply remove the second account from your client
 
I set teh TTL on the existing DNS host to something absurdly short (like 300 seconds) - for a period of 3 days or so before the move.

In the meantime get the new host working - including DNS if your going that far. web, email, etc, everything.

Once you update the registrar also update the original hosts DNS to point at the new host. Since the new host is already to go - seamless switchover.

zero down time.

the short TTL ensures that any ISP or caching nameserver has cached a low TTL request which is sure to have expired and will generate a new request very soon.

Once a few days have passed, remove services from the existing host and monitor the new one.
 
Sounds good guys, one person on XS mentioned metric settings on MX record and using round robin.


i will check out networksoltuions, i don't recall seeing any place to change the TTL settings.

all of our hosting is remaining the same, same Email provider, same WWW provider, we do not run our own DNS servers,. but maybe we should start! :)

we are just moving domain names from networksolutions over to safenames.net in the U.K.

seems like this is going to be a long weekend!
 
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