How to move your dedicated server websites to a cloud server

By Matt Dunlap on July 12th, 2010

Tweet Tags: cloud, rackspace, Webservers

Running a business on the Internet is becoming cheaper and cheaper every year. If you’re still on an expensive dedicated server, sooner or later you’ll want to make the jump to a cloud server. Not only will you save a ton of money, but with proper setup you’ll never fall victim to extended server downtimes.

Take it from me, I’m been hit hard with server outages, viruses and malfunctions. When I was using dedicated servers, I would be down for days trying to get the dedicated server back up. I was at the mercy of the co-location because it was their server and they had to bring it back to life.

Follow these steps for minimal downtime when moving to a cloud server.

Step 1.

Stop blogging and adding content to the old server. Make sure you leave a message to all of your clients, readers and/or community members that the server will be moving, and right before the migration, don’t let anyone add content. It will be lost!

Step 2.

Build the new cloud server. Remember cloud server have much more flexibility when it comes to prices. I often build a cloud with only 512 MB to save money during the install and transfer. Once I get all the files over and point the nameservers to the new server, I upgrade the memory to accommodate the amount of traffic expected. Upgrading and downgrading takes about 10 minutes.

Step 3.

Move the files over. There are many ways to do this. You can use ftp to download the files to your local computer then upload them to the new server. While this will take the longest, at least you will have a good backup on your local computer.

I use filezilla – free ftp client

I like to use wget to move files between servers. Webservers are usually pretty standard when it comes to configurations. You will/should put all the websites in a common area. For example, I use the home folder to store all the website folders. Then when I need to move the websites to another server I just tar up the home folder and then move the new tar file to a website folder. Wget uses http to transfer files so you need to put the files into a location that can be accessed via the Internet.

wget http://the_domain_name/the_archive.tar

Another option is to use rsync. You don’t have to archive the files into a tarball for rsync and you don’t need to have access via the Internet. rsync uses SSH to authenticate and then transfer the files. Rsync is mostly used to make a synchronized backup of your websites on a remote server. It will incrementally update the files on the remote server based on file changes, so your not moving large amounts of files everytime you need to make a backup.

rsync -r -a -v -e "ssh -l <username>" --delete remote_host.com:/home/website_folder/ /rsync/backup/website_folder

Scp is very similar to rsync, but scp will encrypt the files for security. Of course this will take longer and probably over kill.

scp your_username@remotehost.com:/home/website_folder /local_computer/backup/website_folder