Preparing for Cloud Migrations

Migrating your site to our Cloud Server

When chooing our Cloud Server we want to make sure you have the best tools and information you will need to complete the process. This article will cover the step involved in preparing your site for migration to your new Cloud Server.

In most instances we will be handling the migration of your site from our legacy hosting, shared hosting or Stackable. If you are savvy you are also welcome to migrate your files over your sef. Here is an outline of the process.

A good thing to remember and if possible - make sure your applications are up to date - for instance if you are still using Wordpress 2.9 you might want to think about upgrading to the latest version - not only for compatibility issues but for security as well.

Signing up

First you will create an account at store.xmission.com to sign up for our Cloud Service. This will initiate the first phase in the migration process.

Any files located on your legacy hosting, shared hosting or Stackable account are now scheduled to be copied over to the new Cloud Server. During this time the server is up and running and available to log in to.

Any databases are then copied over to the new Cloud Server and files that call to the database are optimized for the new settings.
Note - this is on a case by case basis

Once all the files are migrated an email will be sent out to you notifying you that your new server is ready for testing.

Once testing is complete this will start phase 2

Migration

Once you have tested and reviewed the contents of your new Cloud Server you should respond to the email notifying us that everythign is 'good to go'. Once we receive this email we will rsync your files making sure any changed files are re-copied to the Cloud server - if you have a database we will make sure to do a database dump and move that over as well.

The time taken to migrate your site depends on how large your site is. This can be reduced by removing any large files you no longer need. Removing or deleting any log files, or archived log files or any application cache files.

Check for large files

One way to reduce the time of your migration is to remove large files or log files you no longer need. Here is a handy script you can run from the command line that will tell you where the large files are and what size they are.

If you are on Stackable you can run this from the command line

find / -mount -type f -ls|sort -rnk7 |head -30|awk '{printf "%10d MB\t%s\n",($7/1024)/1024,$NF}'

This will give you an understanding of where your larger files are and if you need them or if you can remove them prior to migration.