SEO perspective with changing hosting providers

The focus of this elaborate process is to prevent both users and search engines from perceiving that the site is gone — or in the case of virtual hosting, possibly seeing the wrong site.Virtual hosting means that more than one web site is hosted on one IP. This is commonplace,because the world would run out of IPs very quickly if every web site had its own IP. The problem
arises when you cancel service at your old web hosting provider and a spider still thinks your site is located at the old IP. In this case, it may see the wrong site or get a 404 error; and as you suspect,this is not desirable.

The proper approach involves having your site hosted at both hosting providers for a little while. When your site is 100% functional at the new hosting provider, DNS records should then be updated. If you are using a managed DNS service, simply change the “A” records to reflect the new web server’s IP address. This change should be reflected almost instantly, and you can cancel the web hosting service
at the old provider shortly thereafter. If you are using your old web hosting provider’s DNS, you should change to the new hosting provider’s DNS. This change may take up to 48 hours to be fully reflected throughout the Internet. Once 48 hours have passed, you can cancel your service at the old hosting provider.you do not have to follow these procedures exactly; the basic underlying concept is that there is a window of time where both users and spiders may still think your site is located at the old hosting provider’s IP address. For this reason, you should only cancel after you are certain that that window of time has
elapsed.

One helpful hint to ease the process of moving your domain to a new web hosting provider is to edit your hosts file to reflect the new IP on your local machine. This causes your operating system to use the value provided in the file instead of using a DNS to get an IP address for the specified domains.

This functionality was also used to set up the seophp.example.com domain. On Windows machines,the file is located in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Add the following lines:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx yourdomain.com This will let you access your web site at the new provider as if the DNS changes were already reflected.Simply remove the lines after you are done setting up the site on the new web hosting provider’s server to verify the changes have actually propagated.if you have concerns about this procedure, or you need help, you may want to contact your new hosting provider and ask for assistance. Explain your concerns, and hopefully they will be able to accommodate
you and put your mind at ease. If they are willing to work with you, it is a good indication that they are
a good hosting provider.