Having a successful website. Usually, web server migration has to do with the website getting too much traffic or too many visitors to the site (exceeding the capabilities of your existing hosting plan) – often the result of having a lot of website success. When a number of visitors attempt to concurrently hit your website pages and visit them, the traffic can result in the pages not being available. In turn, this can lead to a message that basically says the server is busy.

Need for more resources. This has to do with the number of processes that your webhost allows to run concurrently. It's important to know how many processes are included as part of your webhosting package, because if you have a number of visitors to your website, and each of them is utilizing the website – for instance, if you have a ecommerce shopping cart and a database such as MySQL, or a membership website (e.g., social network, content management system, CRM, etc.) – every visitor using the product database or member database goes through the processes and eats up your available resources on your server.

This situation can be equated with your home's power supply. If you only have so much electricity in your house, then you can only have so many appliances running, because otherwise, you'll basically blow a fuse. That's the same kind of thing where you only have so many processes that can be used, and typically, web hosting accounts offer packages with a limited number of processes. System administrators can look at the health of your server to help you determine resource use and the need for migrating your website.

Need for more reliable email. Again, as a website grows to be more successful as a result of ecommerce, social networks, email campaigns, website owners will often have problems with email. Investing well in talented companies that provide search engine programming, submission, and optimization can increase your number of new client inquiries and you can become a victim of your own success. This is usually due to web hosting space availability on the web server as well as details that have to do with the available processes, including access to the processes in order to process email. So, as the email volume goes up, email can be less reliable.

Need for greater features. One important reason for migrating or upgrading one's web hosting pack has to do with the availability of greater features. It may be that your current host does not offer a particular feature which you have come to require after a certain period. You then need to find a better web hosting package which has great features and everything, from CRM, content management systems, social network packages, website analytics, forums, bulletin boards, better control panels, ecommerce, tools for search engine programming, submission, and optimization, cron jobs abilities, and a number of different turnkey applications.

I think one of the best advantages of migrating your website from a shared hosting to a VPS or MPS is the ability to get shell access for your web designers, website engineers, system administrators, and system engineers. Shell access is great because it allows your web designers or web engineers to create more robust applications and to quickly and efficiently set up or write new scripts or write new scripts without having to rely upon tech support for the hosting companies. This translates to savings in the way of being able to write scripts or develop applications in less time, allowing for a rapid development of applications and websites and website code.

It's important to know that before you migrate a website, there is a very extensive process assessment that must take place prior to the actual migration, and that's known as a migration planning phase. This involves doing a proper assessment to determine a number of factors:

1. how many websites are going to be migrated;

2. determine the number of domains, emails, and email forward accounts;

3. how and whether it’s possible to optimize the TTLS to ensure the fastest migration and propagation during migration;

4. d. what type of server you're moving from and which server you need to move to;

5. e. considerations about versions of Perl and PHP and versions of MySQL and other website code-dependent server applications, making sure that this new web server that you're moving to has the appropriate installs, or to ensure that you get the appropriate version installs of various applications on the new web server;

6. f. whether or not e-mail is being handled by Microsoft Exchange in-house, knowing where MX records are being pointed to, and having access to the domain registrars to be able to change DNS settings;

7. for large organizations, one needs to make sure and ascertain passwords and e-mail forward information;

8. How much space and processes will you need in the next one to three years;

9. What are the companies traffic projections including concurrent users;

10. Will the migration alone solve pre-migration problems or will complimentary changes be needed as well;

11. Are there ongoing server maintenance needs and can they be automated;

12. What applications need to be installed on the new server

13. Complete security evaluation

There are other considerations as well. Migration planning is a tier two activity and EXCEL-WEST recommends that migrations should be handled by a qualified and seasoned professional.

When your website was written, an important question or consideration for migrating to a bigger server is whether that code was written to be ported to a new website hosting company or website account easily, without difficulty.

Depending on how the programming was done, some programmers will forward-think and write their applications so that they can be easily ported to a new web server. Some programmers don't thinking that far ahead, and write code; as a result, when the website applications are migrated, there is a number of code rewrites that have to take place in order to make websites or web applications work in the new locale. All these have to be considered as well.

You'll need to communicate all the information needed during the planning phase in order to successfully and properly complete your migration. If you don't know the answers to these questions, then your system administrator (in-house or contractor) that will migrate your site will need to know this information prior to starting the migration. Other items on your list – whether you're running things like Java Servlets, Java, ColdFusion, or PHP scripts; whether you're streaming media; whether you're writing a database, and if so, what type of database it is; what the operating system is that your existing webhosting account is, whether its Linux. Apache/Unix, or Windows – all that need to be considered as part of migration planning.

Are there dynamic aspects of the website, such as forums or guestbooks? Also, do you have an SSL certificate, because depending on who issued your SSL certificate, it will either be portable or you'll need to purchase a new SSL. Some hosting companies offer SSL with their accounts, so that, too, is a consideration.

Part of migration planning includes allowing your system administrator to have access to your websites in order to look at them as part of the preparation. Thus, it is customary to provide this key person with the access information so they can look at the scripts and make determinations about their portability and whether there'll be a need to have code rewrites post-migration.

It's also a good idea to back up your entire website prior to migrating it, and this includes all the files, databases, scripts, and images. This is an indispensable safety measure, just in case you'll encounter any problems during the migration.

These are just a few of the considerations in migration planning. A qualified system administrator can help you make better decisions about website migration(s). Please contact EXCEL-WEST if you have additional questions so we can be of service to you with your migration decisions.

It is therefore important to make sure that your migration team do all the proper planning so that the transition can take place without a hitch. It's also essential to notify all of your mission-critical/business-critical stakeholders. This can be done by sending a pre-migration email.

This notification is also very helpful to your employees. Inform them that you're going to be migrating and make sure that you either have their passwords so they can be reset on the new server, or give them a heads-up about the issuance of new temporary passwords.

Migrating websites are not for the faint of heart; it requires a lot of skills with Unix/Apache, Apache configuration, knowledge of command-line syntaxes, experience with migrating email, and writing scripts or script rewrites. So typically, you want a company/migration team who has several years' experience with system administration, system engineering, and programming.

In summary, the right company to migrate your website will have system administrators and system engineers with experience in Unix and Apache, Linux, and Windows; as well as computer engineers and programmers that can make the necessary corrections to scripts and can troubleshoot issues with forums, email, and SSL certificates.