Hello planet. I have two servers running, one since october 2004 and one since november 2005. What can i say....the only time these servers did have problems, eather i pushed the wrong button somewhere, or it was "school's out - kids tried to hack". And on all incidents, planet solved the problems. Thanks

Now i know my home pc's never lasted longer as two years. I have no clue how long a server lasts. My servers are doing their job for 3 and 4 years now, so isn't it time to move, hardware-wise?

My second point is, the current servers cost me $555/month which was normal back than. But today i can almost get 4 Xeon 3060's with more RAM, more HD-space and more bandwidth included for that money. Moving to two of these would almost cut my montly invoice in half, which is very welcome too.

My questions are;
- could the current prices for my current servers be somehow "adjusted" to today's standards? Less work for both of us and my old servers are most probably even way too old for the bargainbin, useless for planet.
- is moving to new servers possible without being confronted with a "double month" payments?
- to what point can planet assist/help with moving the current hosted webs? Its important to me since i can't handle SSH and have to do everything using FTP. And i have no clue on how to move current email's, mysql dbases, etc.

Sorry for my wacky text, i'm a dutch cheesehead trying to write english

Thanks for your time
Best regards, Karel

Hi Karel, glad to hear our support team was able to help you with those server issues. It is definitely a good time to move to new servers as you will get much better hardware for the money. In some circumstances you may be able to ask the accounting department to review what you are currently paying so that you could remain in the same setup, but in addition to the better hardware, and updated software, migrating would provide you, most importantly, with newer disks which are the most likely component to fail and cause data loss.

The best way to migrate of course is to make sure all data is transferred successfully and the new server is completely configured, and leave the current server online while DNS propagates for your domains. You would pay overlapping charges but you can minimize this by planning the migration 1 to 2 weeks before your billing date, as you will only pay a pro-rated amount for the new servers until then.

Migrating can be made easier if you have a control panel because they have built in transfer utilities but if you would like to ensure the migration is done properly, including email and databases, The Planet does offer migration services for $250 and $2.50 per GB for each server migrated.

Contact me if you have any other questions and I can help to ensure your migration goes smoothly.

Daniel Womack
Regional Sales Representative
danielw@theplanet.com
281-714-3347

Hello Daniel,

Thanks for the reply. It sounds good.

I will move one server on short terms. This one only hosts one domain. Just a small perl script, and a bunch of files in httpdocs. No mail, no mysql, nothing else.

The other one hosts some 60 domains and differend clients (i use it for resell). This one is more complicated and i do it the next month, so there is time to plan and contact clients.

Ps, both have plesk installed, but i never saw an option to migrate hosted sites. But for the first move its not needed anyhow.

I will contact you at your planet's emailaddie when i am ready, if that is ok.
Thanks again.
Best regards, Karel

Personally, I take the position that if the upgrade/server change isn't worth one month's overlap in payment, it's not worth my time and effort to do and I should wait until a future date and use my time for something else more productive.

I'm sure it's doable to do a quick transfer, but I like enough time that I'm not stressed or in such a hurry that I miss something obvious. I like to burn in any new server for a week running simple stress tests like boinc to peg the cpus/memory/motherboard with 100% activity, some drive stress tests, memtest, etc. I like plenty of time to fiddle with optimizing the server without fear of breaking live sites. And I like to transfer a few sites over first, let them run for a few days while checking for any errors, and then do the full transfer after I'm confident the new is outperforming the old server.

smartest post involving a move I've read yet.