On March 9, 2009, we will start the migration process to upgrade old servers to new servers. We will be moving your accounts to brand new servers. We will do everything we can to make this migration 100% problem free.

First, an explanation of why we are doing this.  This move will put you on brand new hardware that is much more powerful than your current servers. The new servers will have dual quad core processors, RAID 10 drives that are built for a server environment, 8GB memory, and plenty of disk space.

We have designed the migration process to be as seamless as possible, there should be no downtime and you will likely be unable to tell your domain was moved. How is that possible? We have built a custom script that handles every aspect of the migration. It migrates each of your accounts one at a time; upon completion, the script modifies the DNS zone on the old server to point to the new server. This way the change goes unnoticed because both locations remain online.

The only downside to this method is that until the DNS change propagates throughout the entire Internet, some visitors might hit old websites on the old server. Due to propagation, if you have dynamic content, updates may impact the old database and not the database on the new server. It usually takes 1 to 3 hours for this DNS change to take effect; however, small ISPs or international ISPs can take up to 24 hours. Therefore, during that period if someone adds a blog comment or forum post on the old server that data will not show up on the migrated site. There is no way to sync what is now two separate databases. We will provide you 24 hours notice of when your server starts migration so we can warn you not to update database driven sites. This should only effect very busy sites, so your average blog should not have any problems.

This process migrates every cPanel setting, every file, every database, so you have nothing to worry about in that regard. In addition, the old servers will remain online for fourteen days after migration is finished as well as offsite backups of those servers.

If you are using external DNS servers you have to change your domain's nameservers to the new ones or to the new IP address.

We will not be shutting down the old servers for a period of 14 days to give you ample time to make the custom DNS change.