Migrate to Asia-Pacific data center II

Following up from my last entry, after so much thoughts, I’m determined to migrate my blog to Asia-Pacific data center. Weekend is just a perfect time that I can concentrate fully on this process, and Go Daddy does provide 24/7 Support, so I still have somewhere to go to if I encounter any problem. Was downloading 2GB worth of files and databases the night before.

So, the morning of Saturday, 18th September 2010, I woke up early as usual even during weekend, and the first thing that I did was to check that all the files from my current hosting are successfully downloaded. Seems everything downloaded ok.

So it’s the time, I visit my account details page, and click the “Cancel this account” link.

After I’ve been presented with this confirmation page, I got paranoid for a while. What if all the files that I downloaded last night actually not usable? So I spent another hour testing all the files on the local Linux server that I have set up, and re-import all the SQL dump to the local MySQL server, and verify everything imported correctly. I’m still in paranoia state, but now, I go ahead and click the Cancel Account button.

That’s it. No turning back now. Even though I still FTP to my hosting for a brief period, but after that, my current hosting is no longer accessible. So my previous hosting account with US data center is officially deleted on Saturday, 18th September 2010, 10:46am.

Been asked to complete the survey, since this is not a good bye cancellation (I will sign up again), I just ignore it 🙂

The next step is a pain one, I have to wait for about 24 hours before my domain name is available for use again. There you go, I’m blogless for 24 hours, and it’s not a very good feeling. I miss logging to the statistic page looking at the visitors to my blog. I miss logging to my blog and check is there any new comment that I need to reply.

So today, I woke up early again as usual, and like yesterday, the first thing that I done as soon as I woke up is to sit in front of computer. I now sign up the account on Asia-Pacific data center, and associate it with my mohdimran.com domain name. Then I have to wait again for the DNS to propogate where mohdimran.com will be pointing to the new server. In the meantime, I set up all the subdomains as well.

Didn’t take long before I can see mohdimran.com DNS is updated. I think it’s just about 1 hour from the time that I change the DNS of my domain name. Now it’s pointing to the new IP address already. And it’s on PHP5 now.

Kinda wondering where the Asia-Pacific server is located. Doing the IP lookup, it seems that this server is located in Singapore.

Then it’s another long hour of re-uploading files to the new server, and re-setup all the databases. I had a little problem at the start since my new hosting is running on PHP 5. There were a few deprecated PHP functions that I used in the application that I create for my blog, which no longer works in PHP5. But it’s just a minor one and only requires a quick fix.

So, on Sunday, 19th September 2010, 11am, my blog is up and running again on the Asia-Pacific data center. I don’t know you, but I can really feel the speed when the page is loaded, and it is much noticeable in the wp-admin page when doing administration to my blog. Anyway, all the widgets on the sidebar may still have a bit of delay to load as those widgets are hosted outside of this server, but overall, I do feel that the page loads faster now. So, it worths the trouble that I went through for this migration.