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.
SQL Server Web Hosting
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.
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:
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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. |
