Changing Servers? Need hosting upgrade.

Zascar

A friend of mine runs a website with a vBulletin forum. The site is only a few months old, and already has over 600 members, and it is expanding rapidly. The hosting he originally signed up for gave him 5GB of transfer per month, but it is going way past that and so he needs a sizeable updgrade, possibly up to 500GB to allow for future groth. The question is, when you change hosting provider and have to migrate to a new server, how do you swap all the data accross with minimum fuss? Can you ftp all the data acorss or do you have to download it all to a pc and then upload it all again? Can anyone explain the process to me or point me to a site that does?

Also, can anyone recommend a good hosting provider for such a site? Prepherably in Ireland for support reasons. If anyone wants to pm me with some offers please do ad I will pass on the details.

Thanks.

Seth Brundle

500Gigs per month this soon - is this a typo?
Im sure enough of the hosting gang here will PM you their offers anyway!

WRT your data - the database is in MySQl so you will need to copy that down and then import it into the new DB.
phpMyAdmin has this ability!My

steve-hosting36

Get a new server, ftp everything over, set up your databases. Then stop the forum on the live server, resynch the db, change over the dns, wait a few hours, and bob's yer uncle

dahamsta

Zascar wrote:

The hosting he originally signed up for gave him 5GB of transfer per month, but it is going way past that and so he needs a sizeable updgrade, possibly up to 500GB to allow for future groth.

That seems excessive. Unless the growth really is that large, i.e. he'll hit 500GB in a couple months, he should take it in stages. There's no point in paying for capacity you don't need, or compromising on a host that's "cheaper". It's expensive laziness.

The question is, when you change hosting provider and have to migrate to a new server, how do you swap all the data accross with minimum fuss?

If both accounts have shell access (ssh or, god forbid, telnet) he can simply zip up the contents in the old location, move it across with scp, wget or curl, and unzip it again in the new location. If he only has shell access in one location, he can run ftp at the command line there to push or pull the content across (although it'll be slow if he has no experience). If he doesn't have any shell access, yes, it's likely he'll have to ftp the lot down to his own computer and then back up, although it's worth checking for inter-server transfer. (Open both up in the ftp client and see what happens when you drag and drop from one to the other.)

Don't forget that database btw, that's the important thing. If he has shell access he'll need to dump it to a file and transfer it across with the rest of the stuff. If not he'll have to find another way of doing it. (I'd hate to dump a site that's apparently as busy as this to MSIE via phpMyAdmin on a dialup connection!) All of this assumes a *nix server, if you're currently on a Windows server you should buy a WhizBang Transfer Dongleflange from your local MSVIP supplier for a very affordable €7829.

I won't get into the hosting recommendations if it's all the same to you. However I'd add that you'll get a better answer if you post more detail, i.e. how much bandwidth he /is/ using, and particularly how it's grown.

HTH,
adam

mneylon

steve-hosting36 wrote:

change over the dns

Depends on the TTL.
Some people have stupidly long TTLs, so you could be waiting days before it updates globally.

dahamsta

blacknight wrote:

Depends on the TTL.
Some people have stupidly long TTLs, so you could be waiting days before it updates globally.

What drives me nuts is when ISP's don't observe them. Trying to explain it to a customer is maddening, you can see them thinking "technobabble".

adam