It depends on the size of the website and you do it via ftp usually.

1) Maybe this guide could be of some interest: "WARNING Consider Buying Website on Ebay? READ THIS 1ST" Source: http://reviews.ebay.com/WARNING-Consider-Buying-Website-on-Ebay-READ-THIS-1ST_W0QQugidZ10000000001669687 2) Here some examples about what could be involved: - "When you move a website to a new server it's like moving into a new house, you have to get used to all the new locations, rooms, etc. What happened is we moved to a new dedicated server which means good things are around the corner but hotmail blocked our IP from sending email to hotmail addresses. Of course our boss could not have this happen so we had our server company change our IP address which had us down for 3 days! They said it would take 10 minutes. So NOW everything should work alot faster and more reliably with this NEW server!" Source: http://s2r2.kleverblogs.com/ - "I have a site: youruploader.com that I want moved to another server as it's crowding me out! I just need someone who will ftp the files down from the current server and upload them to the new server, i'll also ask you to do an sql dump and upload it to the new server as well -- the files total about 10-11 gigs of space. Pretty easy little job! (If you know about this image hosting script i'd love someone who can do some modifications as well, if you know the script let me know and I may open a new project for you)" Source: http://www.projectslist.biz/freelance/Data-Processing/move-a-website-to-a-new-server-image-hosting-scrip/ - "Budget: $100-300 " "Description: Hello , I have Three Database Hosted on Diff, Server . But I have bought a Reseller plan and now i have to transfer all the Domain and website on new Server. 1. Domain Nmae Server Chnages 2. Website Database Chnages 3. Cron JOb Thats All . Must be completed in 1 days. happy Bidding Job Type: .NET ASP Database: MS SQL Operating system: MS Windows Bid count: 14 Average bid: $ 154 " Source: http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/vellekoop_109789.html - "I’ve been trying to move a website to a new server (without reinstalling EE) with no success. So I finally just deleted the database tables and removed all the EE files. I’d like to install from scratch and then reinstall my database tables thru phpmyadmin. If I install the original 1.5.2 distribution of the software, then drop the tables in the database, and reinstall my saved database, will this work? If this is successful, then I’d like to upgrade to 1.6. Please advise." Source: http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/68810/ 3) the idea is that if you have only a few HTML pages using some JPG or GIF pictures, it will not be a big problem, you just download everything from one server and upload everything to the other server. But if you have an active site build on the basis of ASP or PHP and you use also a database, it could be much more complicated. For instance, the goal server should have the same function range as the original one, with the same database. You could not be able to use without much work a website that was developed on PHP with ASP. Maybe it will be better to rewrite everything. Same with the database. It could be necesary to make a plan for your move, so that the database will be moved at a time where no database changes are taking place. If you use a Content Management System (CMS), the new server should also be able to use it. Some modification could also be necessary, if the new server does not use the same versions of the operating system or of the database. Most moves will be combined with a migration.

There are two different ways to "move a web site to a new server". Do you mean that your external IP is going to remain the same, but internally you're going to switch out hardware? Or do you mean that you want to point the same web address (e.g. "www.thisaddress.com") to a new IP and therefore server? This is the easier one, where you just publish your new IP with the DNS servers that you're using, and within 24 hours it should propagate across the entire web (the other public DNS servers). If it's the first (switching out internal hardware), you have to figure out how many layers you're moving. Are you running a simple one-layer website (just web pages, all the data is just text on those pages)? Are you running a two-tier website, where your web layer points to a back-end database? Are you running a three-tier site, where your web layer points to an application, and your application connects to a database? You need to figure out which part of this needs to move. Also, are you moving because of space limitations, or old hardware, or slow servers, etc.?