Dear DP members, I am planning for a migration of one of my blog from my present shared web host to a VPS or dedicated, different web hosting company. I would like to seek your advice on how to proceed on this. Would the web hosting company help me on migration, are there any companies that does this? Do they charge for it or is it free. PS: the blog is quite huge with more than 100k page-views per month. Content size is about 400 MB including pictures and code. Any advice on this is highly appreciated. regards, Josh
I'm sure there are companies who offer site transfers, free is another thing though. Why don't you just download all files, set everything up on the VPS, upload all files to their proper directories, import the SQL and check through the IP if it works or not? When it does work, you can put a last post on the old hosting saying: "if you see this post it means nameservers haven't updated for you yet" and then you can change the nameservers over at your registrar. Anyways, I'm sure you can find companies who will do those site transfers
+1. But I think if you're on a managed VPS, then you should contact your VPS hosting. They might help you based on their TOS. If they don't help, then Aquarezz suggested is the best option for you. I personally believe that updation of nameservers wont take more than 10mins or so though they say to wait for 48 hours for the nameservers to change. All the best for your migration.
True. Also, I don't know how big your blog is, but I'm sure that there are reliable people here on DP who will do it for a maximum of $50 (it might take a few hours depending on the size, but working on $25 hours it's still $50 in the end for a smooth transfer). On the nameservers issue: it depends, in Belgium for example there are providers who update like every 2 hours and some are 12 hours. Belgium is pretty up-to-date with latest technologies, but I'm sure in 3rd world countries the providers take a longer time before nameservers will be updated. I don't know how nameserver updates go with a provider, but I see it as running some sort of cron job thing (although it isn't like this, but this is how I see it).
The best option is to do a pilot transition of where you: Set up clean installation on new server, install theme, back up database and move then, do the dns change and movement.
Great!! Thank you everyone for the suggestions, So what i am going to do is try the transfer my self and will update you guys back. Thanks a lit : Vick kumar, Aquarezz, Bekar09 - you guys made my day! cheers Joshu Thomas
No problem Joshu. I think you can first archive all your folders from your current hosting account and then do a "scp" to your new hosting account. Will save much of your time provided you have SSH enabled on your account. All the best.
dont forget you will need to change the db info (prefix, host, password) and some varibales from within the user tables.
Dear Friends, Thanks much for the tips and motivation. Finally I was able to successfully migrate 2 of my Big blogs to another server without a single Error or Downtime, Worked really smooth. I did a bit of testing, research on smaller blogs before going for the big one. I have taken screenshots and documented the complete steps that is required to do the Wordpress Blog CMS migration successfully so that anyone else interested to do the same could use and follow these steps. you can find the detailed tutorial here Thanks and Best regards Josh