Traffic drops after moving host – common question

Will my website’s or blog’s traffic drop if I move it to another host? this is exactly my question when I wanted to move to VPS server, after this blog was being suspended by my old shared hosting.

I am sure if you are a webmaster and plan to move your hosting provider, you will ask yourself or other bloggers the same “traffic drops” question. You are not the only one here..

The reason why we have doubt and probably are afraid of losing our position in Search Engine, like Google and losing visitors is because everyone has different experience. (related: Google traffic for your blog and get 1000 visitors a day)

Some of those experience no traffic drops, and some have even 40% traffic drops. So for newbie like myself, moving to a new host can be an issue and big decission considering about the traffic drops problem.

Although some people would say, “a, my fault, why didn’t I go directly to a bigger server?”, I still recommend that when you want to start a blog, you should start with a shared hosting, because they are less complicated, and they have affordable cost ($3-$5 a month). (related: How much does wordpress cost?, recommended webhosting for wordpress).

So choosing a shared hosting will be my decission if I would have to start a blog again, unless you have a budget and familiar with a VPS or dedicated server, then you can immediately consider a bigger server with roughly $45-$50 a month fee.

For the price, you can see that a bigger server cost about 10 until 15 times a shared hosting cost.

Traffic drops after moving to new host or vps – my experience

In my “move to vps experience” post, I actually promised to report back if I encounter traffic drops in this wordpress blog after the host migration process.

And after almost 2 or 3 weeks, in the new blog host, which is servint VPS, I am certain enough that I do not have traffic drops compared to my traffic stats in my old shared hosting.

This experience is counted for the entire period after the host migration, in this case, when it is already 2-3 weeks since the moving process, there were some down days where the traffic drops, but only in the very first day while the propagation process run.

How to avoid traffic drops moving to a new host personal tips?

You know, I am a no expert on something like this, I mean traffic drops and host migration, because it was my first experience to move a big blog like this one.

I have moved some small new blogs, even three time, switching between two hosting, so I could not really see the visitor stats difference.

I actually planned to test this, I mean, move a blog which has about more 50 visitors a day to a new host, but I did not have time, until my blog was suspended all of sudden, so I had to move it without testing.

And based on my own test and experiment, this is what I have done these very important things before moving my host with changing the DNS settings.

1. I copy all of databases and my files, those are including the htaccess file, robots.txt file, and any other verification files. (such as Google, or Yahoo html verification file).

2. The last moment before changing the DNS setting of the domain and crossing your finger, I would view my blog in the new server by editing your host file, to see if your new blog is exactly, 100% the same as the one in the old server.

In this case, I did not delete my old blog files first, because I guess my visitors could still visit my old blog while the migration process.

Remembering that, as far as I know, a few hours downtime of a website, can affect your Search Engine ranking.

For step by step video tutorial, I promise I will create when I have time, since it requires a lot of time.

Do you experience traffic drops problem after moving host?