First thing I do is ratchet down the TTL (time to live) on the dns records. As I recall, the default TTL for an A record is 48 hours. When I'm going to move hosts, I'll bring it down to usually an hour or two. It means that you'll get more traffic to your dns servers, checking the address, but it also means that your people should get directed to your new server quickly after a change.
At the point of the actual move, I put up a "scheduled maintenance" page on the old box. You can also set up a new third level domain (new.myhost.com) that you have listed on the maintenance page if you want, for people that need to get things done right then. Just tell them that they can click the link to the backup site during maintenance or some such. Since they haven't gone to that address before, the new ip should come through fine. Then you just have to make the new site respect that address as well. Beyond that, plan to look at the old box to check for any orders/info that my come in unexpectedly and have a plan in place for completing those orders and/or inputting them on the new site. Cheers, Judah Mike Kear wrote: > I'm going to be moving a fairly high-traffic site to a new hosting > company in a few weeks, and I'm starting to plan out the tasks that > need to be done. > > How do you guys handle the transition period while the domain is > delegating, which can be up to 4 days? For this period, both sites > will be active, depending on the status of the dns servers the users > are connected to. > > So how do you look after this situation? > > Do you put a "we're moving so be patient and come back in a few days" > message? or do you keep both databases in synch, doing price, product > and inventory maintenance on both sites? Do you set up scripts to > keep both databases synchronised? What do you do? > > > (I've never had to deal with this issue before - in the past whenever > we've moved hosts, we've been able to live with different versions of > the sites and/or holding all updates for the transition period. But > in this case business has to continue and there will be inventory and > pricing changes during the transition, no matter what days it's done) > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Upgrade to Adobe ColdFusion MX7 The most significant release in over 10 years. Upgrade & see new features. http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion?sdid=RVJR Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:280208 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
