Moving your Dedicated Server Hosting data is not difficult if you plan accordingly.
A complete migration of a website involves transferring the website data itself,it means all the HTML and possibly PHP and MySQL files and CGI programs. For this you will also need to modify the DNS (Domain Name System)information for the website and for the routing of the website email. DNS (Domain Name System) keeps the information that translates IP addresses to human-readable domain names. For any Website migration, the two important DNS records are the address (A) record, which says the browser the IP address of the Web server, and the mail exchange (MX) record, which guides mail servers how to route the email.
When you wants to migrate your Web site to another Dedicated Server hosting provider, you will need to update DNS to point browsers to the new location of your website. However, it can take as long as 12-48 hours for DNS updates to propagate to all DNS servers on the web.
Many times your domain name has been registered through a 3rd party domain name registration company. When you move the website, your domain name and company remains the same, and only your Webhosting company changes. If your domain name originaly came with hosting, you may need to contact your old hosting company to see if you can separate the hosting package from the domain name.
The keys to a successful migration are preparation and planning. Before moving you should inform your users or customers of the forthcoming upgrade. Prepare a “server down for upgrade” page for your old website. Please note the IP addresses of your new and old servers; these will come in handy when DNS is still in flux.
First decide the time when you wants to upgrade, meaning when your server is least busy. If you have website statistics, use those to determine the best time. To reduce down time, it is best to make the DNS changes several hours before you actually move the domain. As long as your mail server is running on the new server, you will not lose any email messages. If you have a static website, you can copy over the data before you switch DNS and no one will ever know your hosting provider changed.
The DNS changes you will need to make involves updating the MX and A records to point to your new server. For that, you will need to access the control panel provided by the domain name registration company from which you obtained your domain name. new MX record will need to point to the new server. For example A records, MX records can take some while to propagate through the Internet. To avoid mail loss you will need to check your old mailbox at least once a couple of days after the move. You will also need to use the IP address of the old mail server rather than its domain name, as you won’t be able to rely on mail.domain.com to check the old mailbox, as that will point to your new server. Depending on how much control you have of your old server, you could shut down the mail server after modifying the MX records, in which case incoming mail would queue up until the new mail server is running, at which point it would be delivered without problems.
How to move a website files?
Once you have changed the DNS information, after that it’s time to tackle the data itself. HTML and PHP files are not hard to move; just use a good FTP program and copy the data from one server to the other. If you have SSH access to both of the servers you can copy the files directly. If you don’t, you will have to download the files to a local machine and then upload them to the new server.
How to move Database from one dedicated server to the another?
1)Moving databases is a bit difficult. For example if you are using MySQL, there are many ways to copy over the data. One is to do a dump of the data into a file and then copy that file to the new server and populate the new database. To do this you use the mysqldump command:
$ mysqldump -p -u username mydatabase > mydata.sql
Once copied onto the new server your can populate your new database with the mysql command:
$ mysql -p -u username mydatabase < mydata.sql
2) If you do not have SSH access to your server hosting package then you would not be able to use these MySQL commands, but you can still use a tool such as phpMyAdmin which handles MySQL administration over the Web. phpMyAdmin has excellent dump and restore features, though for the restore there is a maximum upload file size of 2,048KB. You can use compression to maximize your chances of squeezing all of your data into 2MB.
3) If you lack SSH access and you have too much data for phpMyAdmin to handle, look into a MySQL synchronization tool called SQLyog Job Agent (SJA).
4) If all of the above fails you will need to ask the support team of your old hosting company to dump your database for you. Then you will need to ask the support team of your new hosting company to populate the new database.
If you have a website with dynamic data, such as an e-commerce website, you will need to make special provisions for the DNS update delays. As the DNS changes propagate through the Internet some people will see your new website and others your old. This could cause problems for you. Imagine if a customer placing an order on your old website after you have moved all the data over to your new website.
You can deal with this problem by 2 different ways.
First, stop taking orders from the old website once you have started the move. At the checkout stage display a polite notice asking customers to come back in a couple of hours, after which they should be taken to the new website. If you don’t have that kind of control over your website then the best thing is to close down the old website by replacing its index.html with a notice saying the server is down for upgrades and will be back soon. An alternative solution is to use a synchronization tool like SJA to make sure any changes made on the old website get propagated to the new one.
Finally, watch out for incompatibilities between the software on your old server and that on the new. Try to make sure that any difference in versions of crucial software like MySQL and PHP won’t cause any problems.
The main advantage of a Windows Network Load Balacing Server is that it is a free solution and built-in Windows Wheras disadvantages include load calculation are only on the load of the network.
It is not possible to load-balance more than 32 servers and all servers must be on the same subnet. In order to add more than 32 servers in the Windows Network Load Balancing, we will need to combine many groups of clusters with round robin DNS servers.
It is normally setup on
Windows Dedicated Servers
Security and protection is very important when it comes to dedicated servers. Setting up Windows Dedicated Server Firewall basically refers to devices which allow or deny traffic or any incoming or outgoing connections based upon set of rules. It normally operates within a single network or over various networks in large operations. It prevents any network threats. It’s architecture is to block any vulnerable threats to the main server. On a linux server, we can also configure IPtables or csf firewall through cPanel.
It basically filters packets or units of data transfers basically TCP and UDP traffic. Cisco are known for their firewall appliances which ofcourse compete with other appliances such as Juniper. Some of the linux firewall include Cisco ASA, Coyote Linux etc. Windows Operating Systems offer in-built Firewall, famously known as Windows Firewall. However, we can also configure hardware firewall such as Cisco etc.
Security is a very important concept today and it definitely needs implementation on every dedicated server.
Windows2003 Server Edition is now followed by Windows2008 Server Edition. It enables server infrastructure and is flexible to any server requirements. It also aims to minimize costs and also features new virtualization tools, resources and security updates. This also includes the latest IIS 7.0 which is definitely an added advantage to the configuration of the web servers.
Some of the features of IIS7 are as follows :
a) Application Performance Enhanced
b) Efficient Admin Tools
c) Complete Information on Troubleshooting tools
d) Reliability has improved
e) Auto-sandbox of websites
f) Minimizing security risks
g) Extensible Framework
h) Infrastructur Management
i) Fault Application Resistant
We now support Windows2008 Server along with our Windows Dedicated Servers plans
You can use Plesk control panel to automatically back up your domains for this you will have to enable FTP Backup on your dedicated server.
You will need to specify your FTP server settings in Plesk, and after that you can schedule automated backups.
Steps to configure Your FTP Server Settings in Plesk are as follows:-
1) First log in to Plesk control panel as administrator.
2) On the Domain administration page for the domain you want to back up, click the Backup icon.
3) Now click the FTP Account Properties icon.
4) In the FTP server field, type in the IP address for your FTP Backup server.
5) Type in the user name (login) and password for your FTP Backup server.
6) Click OK.
Steps to schedule Automated Backups in Plesk control panel:-
1) Click the Scheduled Backup Settings icon.
2) Now select how often you want to create a backup (daily, weekly, or monthly).
3) Select the location for your backup files.
4) Specify the maximum number of backups. When you reach the maximum number of backups, Plesk will automatically remove the oldest backups.
5) Enter the name the backup files should begin with.
6) Click OK.
Backup Configurations can easily be done on Plesk Dedicated Server
Dedicated Servers were originally sold at very high prices due to the hardware cost and setup of huge datacenter which had servers which were size of a mid-size fridge. However, with time and technology, they turned over-time and they were much easily affordable by price. Combination of good hardware, network connections, processors and many more combine to result in dedicated server which were always dreamed of. Their sleek size and fit-to-space advantage took over all the other aspects. Newer technology such as Dual Cores, AMD X2′s and then Quad Cores and Dual Quad Core’s were introduced for responsive and dynamic performance. Many Brands also provide high-end corporate servers which range upto 2TB of RAM or above. Their processors are designed to provide optimal performance.
Every Aspect of a dedicated server should be understood before it has been bought. Setup of Load-balancing servers were brought in soon after the requirements itself demanded much more than what a dedicated server can provide. Client’s required to run their services on parallel nodes. There have been many changes that we brought-in within the infrastructure of a server.
Today, it’s reliability and individuality is well known and still remains unmatched to any other hosting package. Bodhost has been providing quality dedicated servers and Virtual private servers which are fully managed and monitored 24×7 round the clock by special dedicated team of experts. Not only this, all servers are setup on branded Dell or SuperMicro Hardware Chassis to ensure the hardware are rebust.
These are the points you should remember before transferring a data from one dedicated server to another:-
1)First thing you should remember to give notice to your visitors and users that your website will be down during a specified period of time for planned migration. Ideally, this time should be in the middle of the night (to most of your visitors), to minimize the inconvenience to clients.
2)Prepare DNS for the move:You should make sure that all your DNS records are set to something like an hour. This should be done 48 hours before your move. By doing this will ensure that when you move the website and switch the IP address in the DNS records, people will get to the new location quickly. If you want to double-check the website before it comes back up, add in a new “A” record that already points to the new server’s IP address.
3)Take inventory:You should make a list of all things which you wants to move.Does your web server have a special setup for your website? Do you have any cron jobs running that you will need to set up on the new server? If someone else developed your website and you are not sure about this step, ask them.
4)Put your website on “hold”: Create a small page that just has your website logo and something to the effect of “Sorry. We are moving to a new server. We will be back in couple of hour or so on.” Put this page in place of your web directory and make sure NO pages on your website can be accessed. Keeping people out of any page will result in no loss of data.
5)Set up Email, cron :If your email goes through an account on your server or you have any cron jobs or additional setup to do on the new server, do it now.
7)Once everything is set up bring your website back. To do this, simply swap the IP address in the DNS to the new server’s IP and you should see your website come up pretty quickly.
8)After a day or so, change the TTL in your DNS records back to what it was before . If you forget to do this and leave the TTL at 1 hour, it can create an unnecessary burden on your DNS server.
If everything goes well, you should be able to move a data-driven website or blog with very minimal downtime and with no major problems.
Dedicated Server Migration is one of the most important process and should be done carefully.
There are many changes with newer versions of PHP which can create a bit of issues on VPS or Dedicated Servers. PHP is a scripting language that is required for many features on a website. There are many changes and updates with every PHP Version. Following are few of the differences that take place :
> Features such as objects, class constants, visibility, constructors, abstracts, interfaces can change
> PHP5 can allow to create classes which can be accessed through Array Access Interface
> It dictates variable pass to function or class method
> Errors were introduced
> get_class(), get_parent_class(), or get_class_methods() are now case sensitive
> array_merge() allows merging of non-arrays whereas PHP5 shows warning if any paramter is non-array.
If you are looking for SSL ( Secure Socket Layer ) to be installed on your domain. We will do it for you.
We Provide SSL Certificates for only 99.99 USD Per Year with Dedicated IP. We will install SSL Certificate and also configure it for your domain name as per your request. The SSL certificates that we provide are RapidSSL, Secure Business Services.
For further information, please contact us through sales at bodhost dot com
Following are steps that will configure your APF firewall on Dedicated Server Hosting packages :
> Open /etc/apf/ad/conf.antidos
> Change LP_KLOG=”0″ to LP_KLOG=”1″
> CONAME=”Your Company” ( Enter Companies Name )
> Change USR_ALERT=”0″ to USR_ALERT=”1″ ( 1 only if you need alerts for emails )
> USR=”you@yourco.com” ( Enter the Email Address )
> Execute : crontab -e
*/2 * * * * root /etc/apf/ad/antidos -a >> /dev/null 2>&1
This will run anti-dos in two minutes
This will Configure APF on your Dedicated Server Hosting Packages