Overview:

Moving web hosts is often a pain, so we've written out detailed instructions to make it as clean as possible and to minimize your downtime.

Preparation:

This section is optional, but best practice if you are not in an emergency move, and your old web host is cooperating. It will make the move go much smoother, with little or no loss of traffic or data.

Have your web host set your TTL (Time To Live) to 0 on your old host, ASAP. The TTL tells other servers that visit your site (including Tracker.ly links) that your server is going to be around for a while so they can cache (save and reuse) the DNS information to speed up response times. Setting it to 0 tells other server to check the DNS information every time because it is about to change when you move hosts. With it set to 0, when you move your web host, people will immediately find the new host instead of going to the old one. When you request the change, ask your host how long the TTL was set to, and then wait that length of time before changing your DNS. It may be set to weeks, so do this early.

If you do not set your TTL to 0, some people will go to the old server and some people will go to the new server, while the DNS change propagates around the Internet. This may result in lost click data on your Tracker.ly links.

Once you have everything set up on the new site, you can also ask your old web host to create DNS redirects to the IP address for the new web host, just before you switch the DNS. This will redirect all the traffic from the old site to the new site.


Moving:


Just copy everything from your site. Make sure you do the transfer in binary mode if you move files via FTP / SFTP. 


To confirm, you'll be moving the following files:


1) The "trackerly" folder and its contents.

2) If there is a Wordpress blog in your home page, the trackerly plugin will be included in the plugins folder.

3) The ".htaccess" file in your root folder, which is often hidden.


Once the move is complete, login to the Tracker.ly Dashboard and click the "Domains" button in the top menu to view all your domains setup in Tracker.ly. Select the domain you just moved in the list. On the "Manage Domain" page click the "Test Domain Now" button. It will check your domain to make sure everything is working correctly. In case any issue is detected on domain, please "Repair Domain" button to launch the installer and do a repair. You will need your FTP details for that.