Any time there is a change to your services, we want the experience to be as smooth and seamless as possible. This is especially true when moving to a new server. Our Migration Assistance aims to simplify and remove pain points wherever possible. We want to work with you so that your visitors, customers, or clients only notice the improvements afterward. That is our mission statement.

If you haven't already, please check out our Self-Migration article here:

Migration Steps

Most of the time, these will be the same steps we will be taking when we perform migrations. We have additional tools that will help us along the way, but the bottom line is the same. If you have any questions about any of the steps, please don't hesitate to ask. It's worth everyone's time to ensure that we're all on the same page at all times.

Once the migration has begun, our first steps are going to be performing an initial copy of the site/service to the new server. Specifically, this will involve the files in the site's root directory, databases attached to the site's control panel, and any email accounts associated with the domain. If there is anything else you would like for us to copy over, or if you'd like anything done a particular way, be sure to let us know. We're more than happy to accomodate.

If the service being migrated is already hosted with us, it's likely that we already have the information we need to do the migration, but there are cases where we will need to be provided a password or some other piece of information to be able to set the same one on the new server. If this happens, we will always provide you with a secure method of providing it to us.

Once the initial copy has been completed, we'll do some preliminary testing and configuring to try to get the service to act the same way as it does on the old server. This doesn't cover everything, but working out the obvious or easy-to-fix errors early just makes the actual testing easier.

As part of every migration, we provide you both an opportunity and a method of testing sites before they are made live on the new server. This is to ensure that everything on the site is behaving how it's supposed to. Unfortunately, we're not able to guarantee all parts of the site work or act as intended. You may need a developer who is familiar with the site for this part.

That said, we're more than happy to help troubleshoot any issues that you find. We have experts in all kinds of sites and teams dedicated to working out problems. If you find an error message, we can probably tell you how to fix it or fix it for you.

Once we're certain that you're satisfied with the state of the services on the new server, we can schedule a time for them to go live. Whether that's immediately or midnight on a weekend, we want to ensure that there's a plan in place to minimize the disruption of the change.

If the domain(s) associated with the services are using our name servers, we can update the DNS records at the scheduled time. Otherwise, you will need to do so.

For best results, we would recommend that you put up a maintenance page immediately before the DNS records are updated so that everyone stops using the old services and are able to use the new services as soon as the DNS records have propagated to their location.

If the initial copy has fallen out of date, we can copy items over again to ensure that nothing gets left behind. This is very common for Email or databases. Please note, changes made during testing may need to be made again if the resync overwrites the item on the new server.

After the services have been made live, we'll do another check to make sure that everything looks right and ask you to report any issues you can find. We strongly encourage you to do the same. Then, once everthing is in place, you'll be free to cancel your old hosting package (if no longer in use), and you'll be good to go!