Moving to a new host is always a hassle and in most cases causes downtime for a site and the users that utilize the site. This can cause many different problems, from loosing visitors to a site, to search engines thinking the site is no longer online (if it’s down to long). There are many things to take care of when changing hosts and it can become a tedious task remembering all of them. One can never remember everything that needs to be moved over. In this article we’ll go over the basic steps to take to insure that everything is remembered and is moved over efficiently and timely so a site will not incur any downtime or delays.

Those that host other users can be even deeper then expected. Each user has its own personal preferences on how things are setup and organized on their account. They also have personal email address, settings, and many other aspects of their control panels that they have customized to their likings. Porting all these options over is almost impossible, if not impossible, depending on the type of control panel that is being used by the current provider. There are a few different ways to go about moving over user settings and personal files, without hindering privacy.

Stage I – Gathering

The gathering stage is the stage in which we gather all the information up that needs to be moved over and start backing it up. This can be anything from files on the server to settings within a control panel. Most of the files should already be backed up, so this stage will be very simple. If the option of moving settings via control panel to control panel is available, then this stage shouldn’t be bothered with.

For those new to switching servers lets go over a few basic things before we continue. When backing everything up, remember it’s easier to work with one file instead of hundreds or even thousands, depending on the size of the site or sites. A simple SSH command can be used to zip everything up into one file. This will also reduce the size and compress most of the site.

A SSH connection can be achieved either by a control panel or through windows itself, if a user has SSH access. Remember to be careful when working in SSH; simple tasks can result in loosing large amounts of data and breaking a site within a few seconds. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, ask for help from someone that knows what their doing.

Connecting to SSH through Windows:

Click Start then Run

In the run promote type: “command”
"telnet" can also be typed here, if "command" doesn’t work.

In the DOS promote that follows type: “telnet”

Once the Telnet program has loaded in the dos command promote, type: “o servername.com”

Then enter your login name: “login name”

Then enter your login password: “password”

After all of the above has been completed, a connection to a site should have been established if the site has SSH access. Once we’ve connected to the site we can use a few simple SSH commands to move around, backup, and transfer anything we’d like.

SSH Commands

LS – LS will allow a user to view the contents of the folder their currently in. This command mirrors the same command that can be used in DOS to view the current directory, DIR.

CD – The CD command can be used a few different ways. It’s the command used to move from directory to directory. By using “CD directory_name” a user can move to that directory. Also the CD command can be used to move backwards through directories by simple adding two periods to the end of it. “CD ..” Remember to use a space after the CD command.

There are a lot of different commands that can be used through SSH. The above two commands can be used to move around inside SSH, which is all that is needed for this article. More common SSH commands can be found here: WebHostingGear.com – Common SSH Commands

There are a few different SSH programs made today, most of which aren’t free, and there are just a handful that are though. One of my favorites and probable the most popular of the free SSH programs is PuTTY. PuTTY combines all of the functions of a DOS based SSH program into a GUI “Graphical User Interface”. PuTTY can be found here: PuTTY: a free telnet/ssh client

Tar -cf file_name.tar Folder_Name

tar -cf

The “tar” command is used here to tell the server that we want to tar or compress a folder or files. This will allow us to compress many files or folders into one single file that will be much easier to manage and move then hundreds or thousands of files and folders.

file_name.tar

The “file_name.tar” lets the server know what to call the new compressed file. In this case we used file_name for example prepossess only. This can be changed to anything that the user may want to use.

Folder_Name

The “Folder_Name” lets the server know which folder we want to compress into the file name given before. Normally a site is contained within a “public_html” or “www” folder. This will be simple to backup, just go to the root directory and initiate the command to backup the “public_html” or “www” folder. This will compress the entire content of this folder into one single file.

This simple command will compress a folder into one single file that is simple to download and move. Sometimes the file can become very large and needs to be a bit smaller. In this case we can use another shell command and try to compress the file even more compressing it from a Tar ball to a GNU zip, or gzip file. The extension of this file will change from “.tar” to “.tar.gz”. In most cases this will cause the file to be compressed enough to manage easily.

The shell command for “gziping” something is very simple.

gzip file_name.tar

Once this command is initiated, the file will be compressed automatically and the original file will be deleted. The new file can be downloaded via FTP or it can be transferred from server to server. In most cases “gziping” a file will reduce its size, sometimes it doesn’t.

Conclusion – Stage I

Compressing and backing up files is by far the most important aspect of moving any site. Without any of the files, a site isn’t complete. There are many different ways that a site can be backed up and transferred. We’ve covered some of the common ways to backup the main files within a site, also known as the static files.

In the next stage we’ll go into transferring all the files from server to server and a few common ways to download the files to a home computer. There are many different ways to move files from server to server and also moving them from a home computer to a new server. Most of these methods are simple to do and do not require much work.