Hello,

I am hosting a very popular web site (Present in cache of all ISPs)

Last time, when we shifted to the new server, we had a very hard time. The site have thousands of signups per day. When we changed the name servers, half of the people were connecting to the old server and half to the new server ... and this this continued for 3 days ... for some people ... 5 days .....

Now we want to shift to verio, this time I want zero downtime and zero problems ....

Please tell if it is the right way to go ...

I will give the verio ns as secondary ... and when it is fully propogated all ove the world, I will ask my current host to delete the entries of our site from it's DNS server. The people will automatically come to the new server cuz the primary will not be resolved ...

Will I get any problems in this way? Will Cache still effect this?

Regards,
JK

I think so however you could redirect the visitor physically, meaning at the old site, have a page that refreshes/redirects, etc., the visitor to the new IP of the new site. This would solve the half still go here, half still go there problem.

What you should do is get your old host to set a TTL of 300 seconds on your zone file. That way the "stale" dns data will not be held in caches for any significant time.

I think so however you could redirect the visitor physically, meaning at the old site, have a page that refreshes/redirects, etc., the visitor to the new IP of the new site. This would solve the half still go here, half still go there problem.


We cannoty do this Chicken .... because 90% people coming to the site come from referral URL like http://www.mysite.com/members/index.php?id=username

If we just redirect every request to the new ip that is domain.com it will not work

Is there any standard solution to this problem?

I had the same delay last time I moved and I'm getting ready to move again. I don't know about your plan (I'm interested to hear what others think) but I can tell you what I did and what I'm planning to do again.

My site is db backed. I don't want stuff being input into two different servers since it'd get out of sync. Once everything was setup on the second server and I was ready to move, I just pointed the first server to use the database on the new server. The queries and updates just went across the net. I'm sure they were slower but at least things didn't get out of sync and I could keep it all running.

I've since added some file uploading. I really don't want those going to the old server once I start to move. I plan on just turning that feature off on the old server and directing people to the ip address of the new server.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

THANKS for the great idea jnestor!

I think this will solve all the problems :)

Well, I would like to hear more ideas.

Is it possible to do such a programming on the server side that only the domain name is replaced by the new IP during the redirection and the whole URL is not affected.

e.g. http://mysite.com/members/index.php?id=1122 is redirected to http://134.26.3.20/members/index.php?id=1122 and not to http://134.26.3.20

Originally posted by thebigH



We cannoty do this Chicken .... because 90% people coming to the site come from referral URL like http://www.mysite.com/members/index.php?id=username

If we just redirect every request to the new ip that is domain.com it will not work

Is there any standard solution to this problem?

If you use Apache you can try it with mod_rewrite to redirect your users to the same place on the new server.

Just use the rewrite engine in the apache directives.

Here is how it's done on the cobalt

in httpd.conf, in the virtual host directive

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^216.40.216.11(:80)?$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com(:80)?$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R]
RewriteOptions inherit

just change the http:// to your new IP

That should do it.

btw. Is your site a porn site? just asking ;)

LOL