Relocation
Within the next week or so, I plan on migrating this site to a different host. Here’s my plan, so as never to experience any downtime – I hope the procedure proves helpful for someone, and if you’ve got any thoughts on how to more smoothly achieve the same result, I’d love to hear from you.
- Update the DNS TTL to a small value (I’ll choose 1 hour).
- Configure the new web host, and copy the website itself to it’s new home.
- Disable commenting on both sites.
- Copy the old database content to the new host.
- Update the DNS records to point to the new host.
- After about 24 hours, take the old site down.
- Enable commenting on the new site.
- Change the DNS TTL back to something more reasonable (say, 1 week).
In this fashion, I’m able to transfer the site to an entirely new web host, and the only interruption in service will be the disabling of comments – but all of my content remains available. If I’m not generating any new content (a given) and neither are my readers (given that I’ve frozen discussion), then I can have two copies of the site running simultaneously with no negative ramifications. When I’m certain that there are no oustanding stale DNS records, I remove the old site, and allow discussion again. Voi la.
Great stuff! What company and hosting package are you moving to?
I’ll be moving to a VPS from Slicehost, which was bought by Rackspace late last year. The prices there are very competitive, and their admin panel offers a lot of flexibility. I also investigated a company called Linode, but I [entirely subjectively] felt a better vibe from Slicehost.
I also felt obliged to check 1&1′s rates, but there’s absolutely 0% chance of any personal attention with their rigid structure because they do so much business – Linode and Slicehost both seem to really value flexibility though, which caught my attention. So far, their service has delivered everything to [or above] their promises, and the host (for being their smallest package) has been surprisingly strong.