Changing Hosting Providers Part 1.

A.K.A. Back­ing up all of your data, set­ting up email, and con­fig­ur­ing DNS.

See­ing as my Media Temple install still wasn’t respond­ing, the first thing I had to do was login to Plesk and see what ser­vices I could shut down to get on with the move. Turned out there actu­ally wasn’t any, so I took the decision to shut down Apache for a few hours while I tried to get email sorted.

Hours were spent research­ing the best way to migrate the seven email addresses between serv­ers, until a friend recom­men­ded Google Apps. The stand­ard edi­tion (free) gives you a cal­en­dar, docs, sites, and — most import­antly — email. 7GB of data per user, with 50 users allowed per domain. There was also the added bonus that I would be mov­ing reas­on­ably intens­ive resources (spam fil­ter­ing and such) off the server, and that if my server ever went down again email would not be effected. The only down­side to Google Apps is that you can’t have mul­tiple domains on the same account (unless you want all the email to go to the same address), so it required set­ting up 3 dif­fer­ent accounts to man­age all my email addresses. Set­ting up an account is rel­at­ively pain­less, involving cre­at­ing a doc­u­ment in the root of your domain to prove your ownership.

The first thing to do was to upload all my emails. This required boot­ing up Par­al­lels Desktop into XP, as the Google Apps email uploader is Win­dows only. It was simple enough to cre­ate a new POP (import­ant, as you need the email avail­able on your machine) account for each user in Thun­der­bird and then upload them to the rel­ev­ant Google Apps account. The only other import­ant step is to modify the MX records for your domain, your host­ing pro­vider should provide some way in which to do this. You’ll want to delete your old MX record, and add the following:

1     ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5     ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5     ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
10    ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
10    ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

Give it a few hours to propag­ate and you’re good to go. The last thing to do is change the set­ting in your email cli­ent to reflect the fact that your email is now com­ing through via Google.

I could now go back into Plesk and turn my mail server off, and Apache back on. As I already had an FTP account set up for each domain, it was easy enough to FTP into them all and backup entire web­sites to my laptop. The only tricky part remain­ing was MySQL, and I didn’t know my admin account or pass­word. Luck­ily cat /root/.mysql_history|more gave me the details I was look­ing for, and I could get to back­ing up my Word­Press data­bases. Once again, a single line of code was all I needed:

mysqldump --opt --user=username --password=password  dbname > output.sql

Where username was my user­name, password my pass­word, dbname the name of the data­base I wished to back up, and output.sql the file cre­ated from the pro­cess. Once that was done I could copy output.sql to my laptop. Up next; get­ting Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Ruby on Rails to place nice on my new server.