Portal Home > Knowledgebase > Pre-Sales Questions > Tips for moving to the new shared cloud hosting services
Note: Please contact us if you wish to add information to this article. Thank you!
This article is a basic guide on moving from one system/provider to our new shared cloud hosting service. Please note that many items may require technical know-how... but if you are technical and a "do it yourself" kind of person then you should be just fine! (If you are not comfortable doing this, we strongly suggest hiring a professional or contact us for a consultation quote.)
Basic Requirements:
- Keep your other account active until you are happy with the new one on our new system.
- Make sure your past account and domain registration is not going to expire within 30 days as a good rule of thumb. Earlier the better.
- Account userIDs and passwords of the old accounts handy.
- Take note of the space and bandwidth used at your old account.
- Jot down the old name servers of the old package just in case you have to revert back.
- An FTP backup of your old site content.
- MySQL can be moved via a PHPMyAdmin backup, However, if your site requires Microsoft ASP.NET or Microsoft SQL solutions then you cannot move your account to the new Linux based services.
Steps/Tips for a smooth move:
- Sign up for your new account and make sure you pick a suitable level that can accomodate your space and bandwidth. Always best to leave "breathing room" for growth too.
- Adjust your DNS "TTL" or time to live. For Parcom legacy account holders you will need to email support. We recommend 5 minutes. This will assure a quick transition when it is time to update DNS to point to the new location.
- Assuming your site is compatible with our linux based system, all you have to do is FTP the contents of your old account to the new account using the new FTP userID and server name of the new system. This is an involved step that requires you to know how to use FTP of course.
- If your site requires MySQL, then using a tool like PHPMyAdmin (as found in our legacy systems) you can make a backup of your SQL database and then import it into the new system. This step is also involved so we strongly suggest a SQL skilled person to do this.
- Set up all your email addresses ahead of time. If you know your user names and passwords, that can assure a smooth transition for email.
- Advanced: Get to know the new system. If you find that starting over is best for your web site (i.e. if you are going to use a content management solution like Wordpress, we strongly suggest you start fresh. CMS solutions have a cool ability to import settings from an another installation! Take full advantage of that on a clean install. This step is for the extreme advanced CMS user who knows about importing and exporting as well as knowing about all third party modules that require installation too. This is noted because so many people have a better chance of success if they start fresh. Moving over a CMS from one system to another may carry forward compatibility issues to potentially worse (i.e. hacked installations that you did not know about as CMS software always have updates and our new system is always updated!)
- Web Mail interfaces vary from system to system. Even our new system provides you and your users different choices to access mail remotely. If you choose to use web mail for your preferred method to access e-mail be sure to get to know it or standardize on one for your users. Otherwise, having every user configured for IMAP or POP3 is probably the best and easiest way to not have to deal with training during transition. Mostly because if they were once POP3 and all goes well, the move will seem rather seamless to them. Web mail will not seem seamless since the system will be different, and the path to the web mail interface may differ too.
- Test, test, and test again. While you still have both accounts running, you can make sure you can see your new web site via a URL or for some professional customers they choose to register a second domain to be an alias. And the alias is visible right away on the Internet! This is a GREAT tip. Most people do not do this but the pros we see love it because then they can make sure a web site move is precise and works 100% rather than depending on a "temporary URL" which really is not as good as using the alias. And then when it is time to move, the alias and the primary domain work well... you can then decide to keep the alias or not for next year. Besides, domains are cheap!
- Time to move the account over by changing the name servers of set on your domain! For many customers this may require you to contact Parcom if your domain is registered via our older system. We will gladly do this for you. Now, if you registered the domain elsewhere, you are responsible for making that change obviously. Once you move over, we can help you move the domain registration to our newer domain management system too. (some people do that ahead of time) But the domain management will then be in your control 100%!
- When you are happy, cancel the old account. If the other location can provide a refund, that is great. At Parcom, we do. So give the credit transfer time no matter what, and do not expect credit to pay for a new account as that can be messy if you decide to change your mind and go back to your old account. Always best to keep things neat and not try to do too much at once! Especially when it comes to money.
Enjoy! These are just basic tips that come from over 15 years of experience helping customers. If you just cannot handle this, do hire a professional! That is why they are there! They learned all this from classes and hard work...so do yourself a favor, hire a great developer if you just don't want to deal with it! Or, contact us and we can either propose a consultation service for you or find one for you (granted it may be cheaper for you to find a local developer that can assist you, but we're always here for you either way.) Sometimes developers may need our help, so it can be a "wash" in terms of paid consultation if you end up hiring a more "novice" developer than a seasoned veteran - but we're not here to judge their skills as they are all awesome, it is just that their skills will vary! We're the experts on our systems, and sometimes paying us more for peace of mind will assure quality - but sometimes on a strict budget, we do understand that sometimes you just want to pay less for a lesser quality job.. =) We know... We know...
Add to Favourites 
Print this Article
