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SEO Bus Stop

Web Marketing Experts

How to transfer a domain

We know of a business near to our offices where the proprietor is paying £150 per year to a web designer to host a site. This is about 300% more than he should be paying. If he was with www.businessbusstop.com for example, he would be paying nothing if the company was handling his SEO as well, or alternatively £60 per year max.

Transferring a domain should be very simple. You should simply be able to identify a new provider, set up the information the new provider needs and then advise the old provider that you wish to transfer to the new one. There is a protocol that says the old provider has to respond to the new provider within a set period of time and also facilitate the transfer.

This can go through very easily and one of our companies has transferred over 30 domains without a hitch in a relatively short period of time.

However, two of our sites were particularly awkward and cost us search engine rankings and also business when the service provider (the ISP) failed to transfer the site within a period of time and then managed to delete other sites linked to it without our permission.

Therefore, it is very important before transferring a domain to think carefully as to the reasons why you are doing it. If you are transferring the domain to save money (usually hosting can be got for £60 per annum from an ISP if you set up the hosting yourself), then you need to consider how often your site will need altering and how much you would be paying your web designer for doing this.

However, if you have a site that rarely needs any alterations and you are simply looking for SEO work to be done on it, it may be worth staying with your web designer simply because their fee will probably not be that much more than the actual hosting elsewhere. If you are transferring for technical reasons (one of the reasons we’ve transferred sites in the past is for the mod_rewrite function to work as some of the providers such as www.names.co.uk do not facilitate this on some of their accounts), then we would recommend www.unitedhosting.co.uk for price and also ease of transfer. Our main ISP provider is www.names.co.uk, but for some reason they do not use an Apache server but instead they use a Zeus server, and there are SEO issues with this. As a result, if you are using a database driven website at a fairly high technical level, then something such as Zoomla! running on it, then you may be better with www.unitedhosting.co.uk. For very straightforward sites however, you are probably okay to use www.names.co.uk.

When we started out back in 1999, we used www.uk2.net and all our sites were hosted by them and registered with them. However, www.uk2.net has over the years had terrible customer service and this has not changed. We have two of our main sites still with www.uk2.net simply because we are terrified of transferring them as they are prone to such awful gaffes that they are likely to lose both of the sites if we dare try to transfer them!

In summary, think very carefully before transferring your website as there can be unforeseen consequences of the transfer which can result in SEO rankings being affected and also your business dropping rather dramatically as a result. For information on SEO work and consultancy, please visit www.seobusstop.co.uk or www.businessbusstop.com for details of our web hosting services.

Business Bus Stop can host your site free of charge and undertake any transfers for you for £20 + VAT.

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SEO Bus Stop is part of the BusinessBusStop.com group of companies - offering business services at low cost internet prices, including marketing, SEO, recruitment, accountancy, debt recovery, legal services and a range of other fixed price business services. Contact us at enquiries@businessbusstop.com.

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