Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

January 28, 2010

Minimizing Downtime During Web Hosting Moves With Plesk

Changing your web hosting provider can be quite a hassle, especially if you have to learn how to use a new control panel in the process. In fact, learning how to use the control panel, often accounts for most of the time spent during the familiarization process that you encounter with every new web host. To minimize the amount of changes and adaptations you'll need to make, you should try to keep the transition as smooth as possible by minimizing the amount new things you'll need to learn with you new web host. Luckily for those with the Plesk control panel , they can take their control panel with them whenever they do decide to switch web hosting providers, as there are many web hosts that offer Plesk as their default solution. If both your new and old web host offers Plesk as the primary control panel solution then you're in luck, as you are about to learn how tom minimize your sites down time during the move using Plesk.

Switching Servers

A common problem that many webmasters have when changing servers is data loss during transfer. This happens because the TTL (Time to Live) is not instant, and therefore some of the data is lost in transition, or at the very least delayed. To prevent this you'll need to change a few settings at least 24 hours before the relocation of your website. Login to Plesk in your current hosting account and click on Domains. Locate the domain that you're about to move and click on the DNS settings.  Then select the SOA record. You'll need to change the Default TTL to 15 minutes or 900 secs. Once you've done this click on SET to finish the process. Now any changes that take place will be final within 15 minutes of the change, thereby minimizing downtime and data loss.

Restoring Your Site's Backup

After about a day, login into the Plesk admin of your new domain and locate the Backup Manager.   Then click on Personal FTP repository settings.  Enter the required information, and type in httpdocs in the directory for backups field. Finally click on OK to activate the change.

Now go back to the main backup manager module, and click on backup. Create a backup name, then click on Personal FTP repository. Click on Domain configuration and content then select Backup. Depending on the size of your website, the backup process should finish within 5 minutes for a small website, to one day for a tremendously large website. The connection speed will also cause time variations as well.  Once the back up is made, you may easily download it through the backup module.

Finalizing the Process

Now you'll need to contact the new host's support company and let them know that you need to restore the backup of your old website. Give them the name of the directory, in this case httpdocs. You can also ask them for assistance in restoring your domain using the backup file, and they should be able to walk you through the rest of the process with ease. Once you've contacted the hosting company, there re literally 2-3 steps left until you have your entire site running exactly the same as it was prior to the web hosting move.

Tags: changing your web hosting provider,  backup manager,  Domain configuration,  DNS settings,  data loss,  control panel,  Plesk,  new web host,  FTP repository,  TTL,  switching servers,  SOA record