Guide for migrating to a new hosting environment or VPS

Guide for migrating to a new hosting environment or VPS

Things to check before doing anything:

• Stats: do they have existing site stats that need to be retained or possibly moved?

• Mail: who hosts their email? We don’t want interruptions to their incoming email.

• Domain name: who hosts their DNS? This will help us to determine whether we need to move the DNS hosting or just point the A record (usually preferable as its easier for us).

Steps:

• Set up a new hosting environment with a temporary URL for testing

• Get ftp details, set up BC profiles

  • Dev -> old live

  • Old live -> new live

  • Dev -> new live

• Check Dev is in sync with old live

• Copy entire site from live to new environment (using bc profile dev->new live)

• Create new database and copy data into it using DTS profile from old database to new database

• Test new site

• Get client’s office to test new site

• Determine when a good time to take the site down is for the client

• When ready to go live. Do this.

  • Put up holding page on old site

  • Put up holding page on new site

  • Move DNS to point to new site (lower ttl)

  • Use DTS to copy database from old to new

  • Retest new site (selenium)

  • Remove holding page from live site

• Back up old site, remove from server

DTS: ‘Data transformation services’ assuming sql database with old having access to new database, or at least dev can access both databases. If not sql server, simply copy database files from server to server via BC ftp.

BC: Beyond compare file diff / ftp tool