Are you a webmaster or blog owner? You may have seen reasons why you should move your website from your local host (Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, India, any country at all) to a foreign website host.

What is a foreign host?

It’s even difficult to state plainly who foreign web hosts are because almost all the web hosting companies in Nigeria and other developing countries have their servers in the technologically advanced countries like the US. They are mostly re-sellers. By Foreign hosts, I mean the original server owners who are based in developed countries.

Why developed countries? A good host should have these following features which is peculiar to the developed countries:

• About 100% Server uptime: Servers are where your public files will be stored. These servers need a steady power to be up at all time so you can dump it in a country with an unstable power supply unless you want to disappoint them at the end.
• Great Customer care services: A nice host should be able to promptly respond to users tickets. This is not just a phone call thing. The internet facility of the host country must be cheap and advanced and the customer care technology must be available to all care lines.
• Features: A host should allocate a reasonable amount of disk space and bandwidth to her customers. Unfortunately most of the website hosts in the developing nations are just re-sellers of an allocated space. Giving unlimited everything will simply weigh their servers down so they allocate fractions of it to their customers at a slightly higher price.
• Price: As discussed above^

How to transfer your website/CPanel to another Host:

Generally speaking, transferring of a website from one server to another is about the same process. The difference is that if you are transferring to a Host that pays in US dollars, then you may need to acquire a Bank Card that is denominated in dollars or another international currency. The good news is that the Nigerian banking system has grown so much with the innovative process that was initiated by the former CBN Governor Prof. Soludo and now stabilised by the present Governor. So many US sites now accept some Naira denominated Master and Visa cards! You can use that of Guaranty Trust Bank, Zenith Bank or UBA Bank, etc. Back then, we must get a dollar card before we could make online transactions.

The General steps to take are:

• Find a preferred hosting Company
• Unlock your recent website at your Admin Dashboard
• Register and make payments to your new Host
• Re-name your name server at your old Admin panel to your new host name server.
• Give it like 24hours for everything to work normal, and then you are good to go!

These steps are not that difficult though they can make a heading of their own. Should you find problem with any of them, do not hesitate to contact your new and old Host customer care. You can also Google the difficult task for more guideline. Generally it shouldn’t take you up to 5 days to complete the process. It took me 2days to move this blog to a foreign Host. Good luck to you!

Tell me if you have any problem with the steps.

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