Although most dns providers ask to allow up to 48 hours for DNS propagation, I believe in most cases the DNS server's will honor your TTL values. If you are hosting your DNS at a provider which can change this value for you (for example if you're hosting it yourself or if you have rackspace), drop it down to a really low value a few days before your move. This will give the new ttl value a chance to propagate.
Depending on how important your data integrity is to you (for us it was important, and we couldn't have data going into the old site once we moved), I would take down the old site in the middle of the night, change the dns to point to the new site and let it propagate. With most decent DNS providers your ttl will be around an hour and it should propagate within a few hours. With rackspace, you can have them set it to 5 minutes (although changes still post at the top of the hour). I have not encountered any issues with this, although I'm sure there are some backwards DNS servers out there that don't respect the TTL values for some reason. I haven't personally encountered one. Russ > -----Original Message----- > From: Mike Kear [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 11:19 PM > To: CF-Talk > Subject: How to handle the transition period to a new host? > > 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) > > -- > Cheers > Mike Kear > Windsor, NSW, Australia > Adobe Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer > AFP Webworks > http://afpwebworks.com > ColdFusion, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET hosting from AUD$15/month > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Deploy Web Applications Quickly across the enterprise with ColdFusion MX7 & Flex 2 Free Trial http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/flex2/?sdid=RVJU Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:280209 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
