Say I have a dedicated server and then buy a dedicated on private rack... is it possible to "smoothly" transition to the private rack...
e.g. I upload copy of the site to the private rack... lock down the dedicated server so no changes happen to the databases and an exact copy is on the private rack and then EV1 makes the appropriate changes in their name servers so that domain.com would immediately start directing to the new IP.
An 1 hour of downtime I could handle... is this kind of transition possible?
it depends on what you run on the server. if it is a single site then its really easy if you just add another server then migrate the data then point the database to the new server and such. we do that stuff all the time.
Yes easily if you are careful. All you need to do is setup the old box to use remote mysql to the new cluster and change DNS over. While DNS is in limbo they will be hitting the old and new server, both of which use the same DB. There may be slightly slower pageloads but it at least works smoothly. The only downtime is what it takes to move the DB from one box to another, if you use rsync should be able to get it down to a few minutes for most.
awesome... thanks guys.... definitely will be using your services 
QUOTE (Macao)
Say I have a dedicated server and then buy a dedicated on private rack... is it possible to "smoothly" transition to the private rack...
e.g. I upload copy of the site to the private rack... lock down the dedicated server so no changes happen to the databases and an exact copy is on the private rack and then EV1 makes the appropriate changes in their name servers so that domain.com would immediately start directing to the new IP.
An 1 hour of downtime I could handle... is this kind of transition possible?
e.g. I upload copy of the site to the private rack... lock down the dedicated server so no changes happen to the databases and an exact copy is on the private rack and then EV1 makes the appropriate changes in their name servers so that domain.com would immediately start directing to the new IP.
An 1 hour of downtime I could handle... is this kind of transition possible?
Yes.
Hey,
I just finished migrating several servers to a private rack, and overall things were pretty smooth... Being able to plan (in advance) which IPs we were going to use (and for what) was great!
1). 2 of the servers were new so we started out by having them setup on the rack first. 0 downtime
2). Another server (with moderate traffic, and one site) was moved to the rack from within the same data center. 30 minutes (+/-) downtime.
3). We then moved a large site (12GB w/hundreds of active mysql databases) from a server in another data center (to one of our new servers). We decided it would be less painful to shut this site down during the move. 2 hours (+/-) downtime.
4). Next we had 2 more servers from the same data center moved to the rack. Downtime was obviously unavoidable here, but the biggest contributing factor was the DNS updates required for the (roughly) 150 domains on these servers. We use DNS outside of EV1 (bulk updates are not an option), so this added an hour of downtime to some of the sites; even though I started updating the DNS records as soon as the servers were shut down... 1-2 hours (+/-) downtime.
Doh! This rack is now full...!
Optionally, we could have migrated most of the sites to new servers one-by-one (been there done that) with zero downtime, but no matter how much planning we do, there is always the chance that we'll miss some obscure setting related to one of our customer's sites (and of course that problem wouldn't be noticed by that customer for weeks)...
Nick
I just finished migrating several servers to a private rack, and overall things were pretty smooth... Being able to plan (in advance) which IPs we were going to use (and for what) was great!
1). 2 of the servers were new so we started out by having them setup on the rack first. 0 downtime
2). Another server (with moderate traffic, and one site) was moved to the rack from within the same data center. 30 minutes (+/-) downtime.
3). We then moved a large site (12GB w/hundreds of active mysql databases) from a server in another data center (to one of our new servers). We decided it would be less painful to shut this site down during the move. 2 hours (+/-) downtime.
4). Next we had 2 more servers from the same data center moved to the rack. Downtime was obviously unavoidable here, but the biggest contributing factor was the DNS updates required for the (roughly) 150 domains on these servers. We use DNS outside of EV1 (bulk updates are not an option), so this added an hour of downtime to some of the sites; even though I started updating the DNS records as soon as the servers were shut down... 1-2 hours (+/-) downtime.
Doh! This rack is now full...!
Optionally, we could have migrated most of the sites to new servers one-by-one (been there done that) with zero downtime, but no matter how much planning we do, there is always the chance that we'll miss some obscure setting related to one of our customer's sites (and of course that problem wouldn't be noticed by that customer for weeks)...
Nick
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