Why A Copy Of Your Site Should Be Retained With Your Old Host Several Weeks After You Have Moved

It is absolutely important that when you move hosts, you ensure that a copy of your site remains with your previous host for several weeks. If this does not happen, then chances are high that some of your potential visitors will end up with "page not found" error messages.

The reason for this happening is simple. It is because chances are higher that a browser will have their requests ending up at a DNS that has not been updated with the new information of the new host that your domain name has been moved to.

Let us explain what DNS or Domain Name Server issue so that you understand what we are talking about here. All computers do not use domain names when tracing a website but instead they use IP addressing. IP addresses consist of numbers divided by dots. To perform the conversion and find the domain name that has been requested, a number of computers act as domain name servers, which attach certain names to the corresponding IP address. Not every DNS can handle every conversion so what usually happens is that it converts local domain names and addresses that it is capable of handling or has information on and then passes requests for other domain names along to another DNS to be processed. The next DNS may or may not have a conversion for the particular domain name request and so this gets passed on until it reaches a DNS that has the information. The conversion will then happen and you will find yourself at the site that you are looking for.

So what happens when you change hosts, is that it will take some time for the many different Domain name servers to be updated with the new information of the new IP address that is now linked to your domain name which has been transferred to another web host.

Interestingly many times some webmasters have blamed their new web host without quite understanding the technicalities involved in DNS and a switch of web hosts.

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