Some Quick Lessons I Learned While Moving Servers
11/19/2008
The Grid Service (gs) at Media Temple is pretty badass. Yeah, it’s had a rough few weeks with some outages, but overall it’s about as solid as any other host. For $20 a month, I’m not sure it can be beat. CSS-Tricks was sitting on it since it’s very launch, and it’s now serving over half a million pages a month and there are probably 30 other sites on the same account.
But alas, I was starting to exceed the (gs) capabilities. I was accruing larger and larger overage charges each month. Besides, a few slowness complaints were starting to trickle in so I figured it was time to go for some bigger hardware. I decided to stick with Media Temple and go with the Dedicated Virtual (dv) service. Still a decent price for what you get, if you ask me. What sucks though, is that this is a manual move, nothing automated whatsoever. You also lose the awesome (gs) admin area and have to use Plesk instead. I’m not a huge fan of Plesk.
Here is some stuff I learned.
- You can export a database of any size from phpMyAdmin from (gs), but you can only import up to 2MB (even on (dv)). So, you are going to have to go in with Shell. Shell access is off by default, so you’ll have to turn it on for the particular domain you are dealing with. You’ll need to FTP upload the .SQL file you exported, navigate yourself to the location of that .SQL file and then do this to import it:
mysql -uDATABASEUSER -pDATABASEPASSWORD DATABASENAME < EXPORTEDFILE.sql
Also remember that on (gs) you use some weird host name for databases, on (dv) it's back to the normal 'localhost' - They come with Apache turned off. Yeah... You have to go into Virtuozzo and turn that on. And... if your site is even unresponsive, this should be the first thing you check. Apache has shut off on me randomly before. The service is called "httpd" in the services list
- Even though I wasn't changing nameservers, it still took a good while to propagate. I figured since the change was all internal to Media Temple it would be instant, but no, it wasn't. It took probably over 12 hours for everyone to see it without trouble. What is weird is that the site with www. in front of it started working right away. Then it failed... then they both came back together. Not sure what to think about that.
- It's going to suck. Yeah, no matter what, changing servers is going to have hiccups. It's going to suck. I'm pretty sure there is no way around it.
At least it isn’t moving hosting companies… That does suck though.
Glad everything’s up and running, though. ;)
Thanks for everything!
I just signed up for a (gs) a few weeks ago. It’s good to know that CSS-Tricks was running from it, even with it’s high traffic/ :)
The real sucky part is changing the absolute references that a lot of Wordpress stuff uses. I mean references such as: /home/user/www/…etc
I got really burned by WP-SuperCache, since it uses that symlink of advanced-cache.php. Also, there are a ton of references in the exported database.
I actually ended up writing a lil’ bash script to export everything (files and databases), dump in a subdomain I hadn’t moved yet (for easy downloading).
Then on the other end an import script that downloaded the exports onto the new server, extracted files to proper locations, extracted the database files, did a search and replace of the old paths with new paths, then restored the databases.
It really came it handy. I should blog about it one day, but I’m lazy. :)
There is one thing that I wanna know about Gride Service (gs), they do like in HostGator and others?
If your site use more then 25% of the CPU, they simply turn your site/blog off.
No I very much doubt that Media Temple would shut off your site. They do warn you if you go over your CPU limit though. That was the primary reason for my upgrade, was because it was the third month in a row I exceeded CPU usage and paid overage charges.
That is the problem to everyone who uses Wordpress, alot of CPU usage…
It was a manual migration, so I don't know what they were waiting for if they did wait to flip the switch. The thing was, it was only an INTERNAL change, since the DNS servers actually stayed the same (both pointed at media temple). The server was ultimately at a different IP so something had to change, but only internal to media temple not worldwide.
Plesk hasn't been so bad actually, it's just a lot rougher around the edges than back on grid-service. Media Temple has their own custom back-end for grid-service customers that is really really slick and easy to use.
Thanks for the explanation. I hope at least you don't have to move again for a good long while.
A custom-made back-end sounds very wonderful and luxurious! Wow, I'd like to learn how to build one for my ISP. That would be a cool project.
I'm sorry for the suckage. I wonder if it sucked partly *because* the nameserver wasn't changing. I work for a small ISP/hosting company and while I don't know the details, I know that when we migrate someone from one of our servers to another (to upgrade their service, usually) one of our engineers copies all the files, email, etc. to the new server, checks everything, and makes sure it's all in place before we do a DNS change with the registrar. It's usually pretty seamless that way.
By the way, I'm curious – what don't you like about Plesk? I've never really used anything else. Is there something better out there?
I’m currently using MediaTemple’s (gs) plan, but am thinking about making the move to (dv). I’d like to know if you’ve experienced any major issues with (dv) hosting since you’ve made the switch. Any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks!
I’ve been on (dv) for about 6 months now and just upgraded to the $100/mo package. I’ve got 5 sites on it and it’s worked great. Tech support is amazing too.