Migrate Your website with no downtime!

Learn how to migrate your website with no downtime! Follow our advice to move your website without downtime.

Follow this advice to move your website to VPSBlocks without downtime:

• Firstly, sign up with us. Make sure you do NOT cancel your old hosting provider, and do not tell them you will be cancelling just yet.
• Setup the new VPS hosting environment, if you use cPanel see: http://www.vpsblocks.com.au/support/Knowledgebase/Article/View/46/0/getting-started-with-cpanel-and-whm
• Copy across all your files to the new VPS
• Backup and copy across your database to the new VPS
• Setup your VPS webserver (if using cPanel this can be done easily see http://www.vpsblocks.com.au/support/Knowledgebase/Article/View/3/0/migrating-a-cpanel-website-to-a-new-cpanel-server)
• Setup your mail server and mailboxes (if using cPanel this is very easy, if you are not using cPanel you can use Webmin or install Mail Enable on a Windows VPS - see http://www.vpsblocks.com.au/support/Knowledgebase/Article/View/56/0/installing-mailenable-mail-server-on-windows)
• Test your site. The best way to do this is to temporarily modify your hosts file to make your own computer believe that your site is hosted on your new VPS. See: http://www.vpsblocks.com.au/support/Knowledgebase/Article/View/57/0/how-to-edit-my-hosts-file
• If your site is database driven you have two options to ensure you don't lose data (you may want to do one last backup of the database from the old host and restore it on your VPSBlocks VPS to ensure data is completely up to date):
  • Modify your database connection in your old hosting and point it to the IP Address of your new VPS (recommended)
  • Add a temporary redirect to your site IP address when people visit your old site, so when users access your site on the old server they are automatically transferred to the new server
• Now that your site is working on both servers and using the database on the new server it's time to change your DNS
• If you are using our DNS servers:
  • Login to your domain registrar and set the name servers associated with your domain to our name servers (ns1.controlmyvps.com.au and ns2.controlmyvps.com.au)
  • Check the 'Manage DNS' section in 'My Account' on our website and ensure all necessary DNS records have been created (if you have subdomains other than www.yourdomain.com.au and mail.yourdomain.com.au etc.)
• If you are using your own name servers in cPanel:
  • Login to your domain registrar and set the name servers associated with your domain to your name servers (ns1.controlmyvps.com.au and ns2.controlmyvps.com.au)
  • Check in cPanel and ensure you have created all necessary DNS records (e.g. www.yourdomain.com.au, mail.yourdomain.com.au, webmail.yourdomain.com.au, subdomain.yourdomain.com.au)
• Now once the DNS change has been made you will need to wait. It usually takes about 48 hours for DNS changes to propogate completely. Once this time has passed and you have checked that your domain does resolve to the new VPS IP address you are ready to cancel with your old host (ensure when testing where your domain resolves that you have removed any changes to the hosts file).

Congraulations! You've now completed a downtime free migration with no impact on your customers. Better still you can expect a 99.99% uptime on your VPS with VPSBlocks!!