10:02 by FoxTwo
Painless Website And Blog Migration
Some time back last year, I wrote about how to do "Disaster Recovery" on your website.
Today, I did exactly just that!
Well, don't worry, you probably didn't even notice it, because both sites were mirrored before I did the DNS change. For those people whose ISP have slower DNSes, they will still hold the old IP address to my old site. For those people who have already updated, will get the new site. In any case, the only difference is that the old site won't have this blog entry; the new one, ie this one, will.
Why did I change host?
Very recently, like a few days ago, I noticed that it took a very long time to access my website. Various tests showed that it wasn't my webhost, but more likely to be a Starhub problem. However, since I do get comments on my blog posts, I really hated to wait and wait for my site to load before I can reply their comments.
So, I went hunting for a new FREE host. Yes, I found a FREE host, within 30 seconds of Googling for one - 10GBFreehost.com. It offers 10GB space and 20GB monthly bandwidth. My current one offered only 5GB space, but 300GB monthly bandwidth. Since I doubt I will ever hit anywhere near even 5GB of bandwidth per month, the drastic reduction of "free bandwidth" isn't a problem.
Plus, this new host offers FREE MySQL databases, 5 of them in fact! Not only that, each database can be as large as 200MB. Now, 5 databases WOULD come in useful, should I ever decide to switch blogging platforms to one that require MySQL.
So, in the wee hours of this morning, I loaded up my trusty FTP program Filezilla, and started to mirror my existing site over to a new host. Migrating a Blogger platform blog is easy as pie actually. All I needed to do was to make sure every file that exists on my current server is transferred over to the new server in the same exact place. That means keeping all the files in the same directories, and recreating them on the new server the same way.
I didn't even need to touch any settings in Blogger.com itself, since I have already pointed it to "foxtwo.org" which is controlled by the DNS.
After the files were successfully transferred, the only thing left to do is to change the DNS to point to the new server. Sit back, relax, and wait for 72 hours for all DNS servers wolrdwide to update themselves with my new IP address. In the meantime, the old site still contains everything, so people that aren't updated will still get my old site and old contents.
If you're reading this entry, that means the DNS that you're using is already updated with my new webhost. See? It's transparent to you!
Labels: disaster recovery, internet, webhost, website
