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The SQL Web site hosting business has become more competitive in recent
years. If you can find a better hosting deal, you may be able to save money by
switching SQL Web hosting providers. But what's the best way to move your Web
site? What if you have a virtual private server (VPS) hosting several domains?
What about PHP and your SQL data? The thought of moving may be daunting, but
moving servers is not difficult if you plan properly. Here's how.
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A complete migration involves transferring the site data itself, meaning all the
HTML and possibly PHP and MySQL files and CGI programs. You also need to modify
the Domain Name System (DNS) information for the site and for the routing of the
site email. DNS holds information that translates IP addresses to human-readable
domain names. For Web site migration, the two important DNS records are the
address (A) record, which tells the browser the IP address of the Web server,
and the mail exchange (MX) record, which tells mail servers how to route the
email.
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When you migrate your Web site to another SQL web site hosting provider, you
need to update DNS to point browsers to the new location of your site. However,
it can take as long as 48 hours for DNS updates to propagate to all DNS servers
on the Internet. Part of your planning will be how to deal with that delay.
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Often your domain name has been registered via a third-party domain name
registration company. When you move the site, your domain name company remains
the same, and only your Web hosting company changes. If your domain name
originally came with hosting, you may need to contact your old SQL server
hosting company to see if you can separate the SQL server hosting package from
the domain name.
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The new MX record will need to point to the new server. Like A records, MX
records can take a while to propagate through the Internet. To avoid mail loss
you will need to check your old mailbox at least once a couple of days after the
move. You will also need to use the IP address of the old mail server rather
than its domain name, as you won't be able to rely on mail.domain.com to check
the old mailbox, as that will point to your new server. Depending on how much
control you have of your old server, you could shut down the mail server after
modifying the MX records, in which case incoming mail would queue up until the
new mail server is running, at which point it would be delivered without
problems.
Moving databases is a bit more complex. Assuming you are using MySQL, there are
several ways to copy over the data. One is to do a dump of the data into a file
and then copy that file to the new server and populate the new database. To do
this you use the mysqldump command:
If you don't have SSH access to your servers you won't be able to use these
MySQL commands, but you can still use a tool such as phpMyAdmin that handles
MySQL administration over the Web. phpMyAdmin has excellent dump and restore
features, though for the restore there is a maximum upload file size of 2,048KB.
You can use compression to maximize your chances of squeezing all of your data
into 2MB.
If you lack SSH access and you have too much data for phpMyAdmin to handle, look
into a MySQL synchronization tool called SQLyog Job Agent (SJA).
Finally, watch out for incompatibilities between the software on your old server
and that on the new. Try to make sure that any difference in versions of crucial
software like MySQL and PHP won't cause any problems. |
