The Free World: Moving Hosts Tip

I’ve had the dubious pleasure of moving hosts twice in the last week. The first time was from an unmanaged VPS at Unixshell to a managed VPS at TekTonic. The second move was from the managed VPS at TekTonic to a managed VPS at PowerVPS. The difference between an unmanaged plan and a managed plan is like night and day.

An unmanaged plan gives you a box with a Linux distro on it (unless you get a Windows unmanaged VPS which are few and far between). A managed plan, in most cases, gives you a box with a Linux distro and a management panel like cPanel and all the ‘normal’ type stuff you’ll be expected to need like PHP and MySQL. It’s the cPanel Web Hosting Manager (WHM) that makes all the difference when you’re transferring servers. Moving from a WHM server to another WHM server is so ridiculously easy that it almost defies description.

Moving from the unmanaged required me to transfer each of my 10 domains manually. I had to tar up each domain, dump the databases and then recreate the domains, restore the tarballs, and restore the databases onto the new server. This took an entire day and there were still lots of permission errors at the end of that day. Moving from a WHM server to another WHM server literally requires a couple of clicks per domain. On the new WHM server, you can import an account from the old WHM server with ease.

The steps are so ridiculously easy that I won’t bother to list them here, but suffice it to say that I *highly* recommend getting a WHM enabled VPS from the get go. You’ll thank yourself later when you have to move hosts. And we all have to move hosts from time to time.