Moving from shared hosting
Shared hosting hides a great deal of work from you. A dedicated server hands it all back, along with the performance you were missing.
What you gain
- Resources that are actually yours, not a slice policed by limits you cannot see
- Root, so you choose the PHP version, the extensions, the database engine and the cron jobs
- No neighbour whose traffic spike becomes your slow afternoon
- An IP address with a reputation you control — see reverse DNS and blocklists
What becomes yours
Everything above the hardware. Updates, backups, firewall, certificates, the mail stack, monitoring and the three in the morning when something stops. Our machines are unmanaged by design: we keep the hardware and the network running, you keep the operating system running.
A control panel takes a large share of that back, and we include a free DirectAdmin licence with every server precisely so that the jump is smaller than it looks.
A migration order that works
- Build the new machine and get it serving the site from a test name or your hosts file. Do not touch DNS yet.
- Copy the data — files with rsync, databases with a proper dump. See migrating in.
- Get certificates working on the new machine. With HTTP-01 that needs DNS to point here, so use the DNS challenge instead — see TLS certificates.
- Lower the DNS TTL to 300 seconds at least a day beforehand, so the switch is quick when you make it.
- Final sync and switch. Put the old site in read-only mode if you can, sync the delta, change the records.
- Leave the old hosting running for a week. It costs one more month and it is the cheapest insurance available.
The parts people forget
- Email. If your shared host also handled mail, moving the website moves the MX if you are not careful. Decide deliberately whether mail moves with you — and read sending mail from your server first, because running mail yourself is a real commitment.
- Cron jobs. They exist in the old panel and nowhere else. Write them down before you cancel.
- .htaccess rules. If you move to nginx they do not come with you; they have to be translated. See nginx, Apache or Caddy.
- PHP version and extensions. Match the old environment first, upgrade afterwards as a separate change.
- Backups. Your host was probably taking some. Now nobody is until you set it up — see backups.
Do not move everything at once
One site, prove it, then the rest. A migration that goes wrong with one site on it is an evening; the same mistake with thirty is a week.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base