This is a beginners guide to transferring your existing website that is hosted with your current web hosting provider to a new web hosting company. This is a common task that I get a lot of requests on how to do. This may seem difficult at first to the average user, but the steps in transferring are quite easy. I suppose it does vary, depending on what web host you have. Most likely, you can always call your current web hosting provider and ask them for help on transferring. However, if your looking to transfer your website yourself, you can do it easily by reading this article.

Step 1) Purchase a second hosting account. Go to the new web hosting company  you would like and purchase a hosting plan. We suggest that you view our recommended web hosts on our home page. Also remember not to purchase an additional domain. Many times when you’re looking to buy a web hosting plan, they try to sell you a domain as well. But since you are transferring, you probably already have a domain.

Step 2) Use a FTP program such as FileZilla to copy all of your website’s files to your local computer.

Step 3) Assign your current domain name to your new web hosting plan. Again  each Hosting company is different. HostMonster makes it really easy to do. You simply login to your cPanel control panel and click on “domain manager”. Then you can select the “Transfer a new domain to your account” option. Again each webhost will be slightly different, but they should all have the same principal.

Step4) You may have to login to your domain registrars control panel and change the DNS settings of your domain to that of your new web host.

step 5) Now that your domain name should be linked with your new webhosting account, you can now upload the website files on your computer to your new hosting account using the FTP program you used in step 2.

And now you’re done! It’s fairly simple once you do it and get the hang of it. It should probably take you about 20 minutes to figure out. However, you should expect to wait at least 24 hours for your hosting company to transfer the domain over to the new one. Hope you find this guide helpful. Again, you can always call your current web hosting provider for help on this if you get stuck.

CPanel is the industry’s leading software for many web hosting providers. CPanel provides the back end user interface that allows the client to login to their webhosting account and set up all the features of their webhosting. CPanel is commonly used, but not every web host provider uses it. Some web hosts have their back end user interface, like Yahoo!. We recommend that you try to find a host that uses CPanel as it allows you to do many more things than most other Web Hosting User Interfaces.

CPanel may seem daunting at first when you first login. You will see many different options and menus, but don’t let this scare you. The options are neatly categorized under their appropriate menus. Spend 2 minutes of your time looking around CPanel, and you will quickly  understand the layout and how CPanel works. For the average user, you should have no problem logging in, finding out what settings you want to change and how to do it using CPanel. For example, if you want to add a domain name to your website, you would simply go to the Domains menu in CPanel and click addon Domain. As you see, its very easy to use.

CPanel can provide an easy to use interface for changing basic web hosting needs, but also provides advanced options for users as well. You can easily update scripts, install WordPress blogs, import/export MySQL databases, and more. Although CPanel is not desperately needed for the average user (as they probably will not be changing many settings in their web hosting account), we would still recommend it. Especially for those more advanced users who plant on hosting numerous websites, importing multiple domain names, etc. So to conclude, try to find a web hosting provider that uses CPanel. It’ll be worth it. You can check out our most recommended web hosts list here.