3)Can you afford long downtime on your site You may find that your site goes down far too frequently. This could be as a result of your host gaining many more clients than their resources can support. Your site could also be taking too long to open. There are a host of other technical problems associated with your web host that could cause these.

A situation like this would mean that valuable traffic is lost forever and would be cause enough for you to change hosts to a more efficient and reliable organization.

4)If you are using a free site, you're not in serious business If you are currently using a free site, then it is imperative that you change to a paid site as soon as possible. A free site is more expensive than most can afford. A poor image and lack of credibility will mean that few people will dare buy from you. Some search engines also do not index free-hosted sites, which would impact on your traffic since search engines are chief method of receiving traffic.

5)You will need a blog which is a challenge to most web hosts Blogs are rapidly becoming an important part of any online presence. Blogs usually put a heavy demand on networks and servers because of their nature. For example they require capabilities for rapid content updates and heavy traffic. Webmasters will need to be especially sure that their host's network is scalable enough to handle load.

To transfer domain name service to a new host identify registrar using "WHOis" lookup http://domreg-m6.net/domains/WHois.asp, verify registration of your domain name, identify name server information for host your are transferring to, and make changes in DNS information at registrar. During this DNS transition period new DNS information has to be propagated throughout world's DNS servers. This propagation might take 2-4 days as an International root name server will firstly have to check all various Domain registrars for updates, and then every ISP provider will update their DNS setting to show new changes. Not only this, even Internet, i.e. Internet routers and caching engines have to update/clear its DNS cache as well. During this propagation period, you keep your old site running so that visitors whose ISP provider haven't updated can still visit your website.

It's advisable that you don't cancel your old hosting service during transition period, as you will need to check your mail from both hosting providers, as some will direct e-mail to your old server whereas other Internet regions will send mail to your new server. After one or two weeks you can annul account with your old host.

On very first notion it sounds like a painful task to find a new web host and make all necessary changes, but with steps known, people like John will not find this procedure problematic. With so many automation software packages available, it has now become easier to switch over your web site from old host to new host. If both hosting providers have same operation system platform, procedure will become even simpler. But remember, most important task in whole host-changing scenario is to find a host that meets your requirements so that you don't have to go through this entire procedure again in future.