Moving in from another provider
Most new customers arrive with something already running elsewhere. The move itself is rarely the hard part; the planning is.
Before you order
- Write down what the old machine actually does. Services, ports, cron jobs, certificates, anything that mails out.
- Check the DNS records that point at it, and lower their TTL to five minutes a day before you move. That is the single best trick for a short cutover.
- Note your current traffic peak, so the new uplink is sized on reality rather than on a guess.
- Ask us for the new machine with the same or newer operating system, so you are not debugging a distribution upgrade and a migration at the same time.
Moving the data
Sync while the old server is still live: rsync -aHAX --delete over SSH,
repeated a few times, gets the bulk across without downtime. Databases get a proper
dump or replication, never a file copy of a running data directory.
Then a short window: stop the service, run the final sync, start it on the new machine. For most sites that is minutes.
Cutting over
Switch DNS, keep the old server running for a day or two, and watch the logs on both. Stragglers with cached DNS will still arrive at the old address, which is fine as long as it is still answering.
Your addresses
If renumbering is painful — a lot of customers on your IPs, firewall rules at their end — consider bringing your own IP space. Then the addresses move with you and nobody notices. If the space belongs to your old provider, it stays with them; that is worth knowing before you build a dependency on it.
What we can do for you
We will size the machine, prepare it with the OS you want and be around during the cutover window. We do not log into your old server and we do not run the migration for you — the servers are unmanaged — but an engineer on the other end of the ticket while you work is exactly what we are here for.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base