Moving Day

[ALElder]

Can someone please help me I am looking at moving my site to a new hosting company but don't know the best way to go about doing it can someone please give me the steps.

Thanks,

Adam

[tcshadow]

It really all depends... the easiest and best option would be if you are moving from a cpanel host to another cpanel host. If the new company you find is a good one, they will be able to assist you with the move.

My new host got my login details off me and logged onto my old hosting, backed my entire site up, transfered it onto their hosting then told me to change DNS and it was done.

I'd recomment calling the support line or email of your potential new host to
a) see if they actually pick up and are helpful and
b) are willing to assist you in moving your site across.

If not, find a new host. You get what you pay for but some cheaper hosts are definitely very helpful. You don't need to spend an arm and a leg you just need to shop around.

I wouldn't recommend anything under $20/month though... cheap and nasty generally means cheap and nasty.

[met00]

Is your store your primary business? If it is then I recommend against all shared hosting solutions. Why? One bad PHP file or MySQL query from someone else on the server can kill your site.

I tend to use 1and1 as my primary service provider and since I know what I am doing I generally get a root server. But, if you don't know what you are doing, I suggest that a managed server would be a better solution.

As for moving the store. That's a true PITA (pain in the A##). I have done it a number of times, but since we set up stores and then upgrade the product the moves are truly painful as it's never as simple as backup on one box and restore on another.

And for the record. I move a store off a server to a new server every four years. Period. This has to do with the simple fact that there is a significant cost savings in doing so as the price/performance issues are dramatic between servers over that time period. In addition, there are massive changes in functionality of the store software as well (we are constantly updating the software we use). Finally, think about your own PC. You use it constantly over a four year period... aren't you about ready for a new PC? When I was a CTO I used to have PCs rotated out every three years for the same reason I rotate out of servers every four. A hard drive spinning for 35,064 hours is a long time for a single point of failure to be operational (not to say anything else that has also been operating for over 35,000 hours).

Good luck.

[michael_s]

I do server moves for database driven sites all the time, and they are actually really easy to do, with a little forethought and planning (and, practice. I get a lot of that!)

Basically the the best way to do this with the least downtime is to copy all the files over to the new server first, and grab a copy of the database and install that too. Test the new server (don't do anything with the live site yet). Make sure everything is happy on the new server.

Next, If you manage your own DNS records, set the TTL to something lile 180 for your A record for your domain. If not, you are going to have some downtime. After doing that sit tight for 24 hours to let the new TTL propagate.

The next day, when you are ready to switch the site to the new server, put the old site in Down for maintenance mode to prevent data sync problems. Once in maint mode, do a mysqldump of your database off the old server and run it on your new server db. Then login to the new server admin panel and take it out of maintenance mode.

Finally, switch the A record in your domain DNS settings to point to your new IP address. Then flush your local dns cache and within about 5 minutes, your site will be fully resolving to the new server.

How can you tell? Easy, the new server install is not in maint mode, so it will show a live site and take orders. The old server site is in maint mode, and will soon disappear from dns completely

When you are happy with the results, say 24 hours later, then update the nameservers to point to your new hosts nameservers and change your A record TTL to something a little longer like 14440.

Total downtime is typically less than a few minutes.