Everyone here must have gone through server migration once in a while. What could be good approch so that the downtime can be kept to minimum. Ideally I would like to have this 1. Setup entire site on new host (site accessible using new host IP address, since NS are still pointing to old servers) 2. Change the NS. The nameserver change should be transperent to users with no site outage at all because site is already migrated to new servers. One issue with this is, lot of scripts/cms use the domain name to configure the site web address (like wordpress, joomla etc). So while installing these scripts on new servers (as in step 1) these scripts will use the IP based address of website. Once NS changes propogated this can be changed to actual site web address. Any other tips, suggestions, HELP is greatly appriciated. Update: Is is possible to setup site on new server with (say) a spare domin name, and then when everything is working fine and NS changes are done, map that spare domain hosting account to the one desired? Not sure if its possible in all circumstances. Anyone has done it? Thanks dshah
I work for a web development company that frequently moves domains onto our servers. What we typically like to do is to first gain control of the domain account, and set it up to point to our nameservers. We'll initially set our nameservers to still point to the old IP. This gives DNS servers plenty of time to find our nameservers. Typically one to two weeks is ideal. Then we like to setup a subdomain for that site to point to the new location for testing purposes. For example test.domain.com. This allows us to test the site to be sure everything is working properly. Then when it's time to switch the domain over, we just need to update the IP address in the nameservers, and it transfers over pretty quickly. Unfortunately there will always be a lag. Some ISPs cache the DNS information. But htis process works well for us. We are able to control our environment pretty well though because we have our own servers with full control over everything. So your experience may vary. Can't really say much about the scripts problem, we custom develop all of our apps, so we don't have any experience with WordPress or joomla migrations.
I did as above recently with wordpress and the only issue I had was ??'s in the text when I populated the new db
I was able to do it pretty quickly, with downtime like less than an hour I copied all files to new server, imported database. So when NS change happens it should carry over just fine. Only few things I needed to take care of 1. Update the physical location storedin config files for scripts such as joomla, gallery etc 2. Update database connection properites. This worked pretty well, though I had bit of downtime because I didn't set these two things properly. Thanks dshah
I've always just copied files to the new server and then changed the nameservers like you suggested already. I'm sure theirs better ways but this always worked fine for me and I never had any downtime. The only issue is for user driven dynamic sites (like forums), but in those cases I just disable the boards on the old server and enable them on the new. Once users hit the new server they'll get the site open again. Otherwise leave them both open but users posts, etc. will vanish leaving them wondering what happened.
I wrote an article on this a couple of weeks ago.. http://digg.com/linux_unix/Move_to_a_new_web_server_without_downtime