By afs2015
I’m looking to move from a Digital Ocean droplet where I have a webpage hosted on a standard LAMP setup and i’m looking to move to a new droplet where I have an Express/Node.js setup.
My question is what is the best way to assign my Hostname to my new droplet while:
- Not affecting my search engine rankings.
- Making downtime for the website minimal.
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Your search engine rankings will depend much more on the content on your site than the IP your domain is pointed to so that should not be a concern if you have taken the same steps to optimize your new site as you did with your old one.
You can use a host file entry on your local machine to test your new site using your domain name before changing over your DNS. If both servers are active the DNS change should not cause any downtime but for a couple hours (while the change propagates) some users may see your old site while some see the new one.
Keep both sites up until the TTL for the A record that you changed expires. You can confirm with logs if visitors are still accessing the old site. Once traffic stops happening, turn the droplet off.
Search engine ranking is not something you have control over, really.
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