Transferring nameservers & db's

[Jack]

I need advice on transferring databases and causing the least amount of corruption.

I have an existing shop on another host. Here's my concern:

Let's say I put in a request to transfer my nameservers today. They may not propagate for several days and I won't know when.

After making the above request, I make a copy of my database on my old shop and copy it to Jag. If nothing happens on my old shop between now and when the nameservers switch, then everything is fine.

But if I get an order after I copy the database to the new shop but before the nameservers switch, my databases will be out of sync. I can manually edit the database to add these changes if that is all that happens. But if I also get an order on my Jag account before I can do this, I won't be able to manually edit the orders since they will have duplicate order information. This could result in a loss of an order.

The odds of this happening are probably low although I have found that, for some unknown reason, my orders come in groups. And since there is no way for me to know when the change will happen, the odds increase. Is there a safer way to do this or is it just a matter of taking a chance?

Jack

[jason]

You could forward all of your users to the IP/server name of your new site, but that would cause the address in their browsers to change and might make them suspicious.

Another option would be to try this:

1. Find the IP address of OUTBOUND connections on your current server. (This may be different from your site's IP address if you have a dedicated IP, most likely it is the main IP of the server.)

2. In your CPanel on the JPC site, go to the MySQL Databases section and scroll to the bottom of the page. In the "Add Access Hosts section add the IP of your current server. This will allow that server to connect to MySQL on your JPC server.

3. Back up your databse and import it into MySQL on the JPC server. Also move the rest of your site.

4. On the old server change the MySQL server from localhost (or whatever you are using now) to the IP address of your new site. This will allow your old site to connect to the database on the new server so that all of your data will be in one place. (Make sure you change all of the places where MySQL connections happen, though, or you could end up writing different parts of your orders to different databses--not good.

This is not a perfet solution, but it will hold you off for a few days while the changes propagate. I've connected to databses remotely and it works well. I've never done it from one server to another before, though. Be sure to place a test "order" once you make the change to be sure it is working.

--Jason

[Jack]

Thanks Jason. That sounds like it will work but is probably beyond my experience. If something went wrong I probably could not recover very quickly. If I could practice first then I would be more likely to try it but I only have one shot at it. Guess I will just take a chance and move them. I've only gotten a few orders on weekends since I started the site so odds are I won't run into any problems if I can plan it for that somehow. Do you, or anyone, know if propagation time include weekends? Seems a silly question but you never know. If I transfer them on Thursday, I might luck out and have them switch on Saturday or Sunday.

Jack

[jason]

I just wrote a big long reply to this, but I did it in the wrong thread. Check it out the the thready you started in the Sales section at http://forums.jaguarpc.com/showthrea...threadid=11400

--Jason

[Jack]

Thanks for the explanation. It is what I thought was going on. I have an option in my shop to mark it as shut down for maintenance so I will probably just apply that late Friday and, hopefully, have everything running by Monday.

Jack