Best way to move a site from one sever to another

[MikePros2]

I am not sure if this is the right place to post this but I do apologies if not as I think you guys have a lot of experience in buying/selling websites and here is what I want:

In short:
" I bought a website but I don't know how to move it"?

In details:
Say I have my own (domain+host+contents) at http://www.mysite .com and I just bought a new site say http://www.new .com on a different server, now I want to move it to mysite as a subdomain like http://new.mysite .com.
The straightforward way I was think is to just download/export everything from the new one and upload/import to mysite (including the databases), well I don't think this is the best (and yet the right) way to do that is because things get really complicated when you have too many databases with many-subdomains in addition to the problems with the user-names and passwords for all the databases.
How do you guys deal with such kind of processor, there should be an easy way to do that, I think?

Any idea greatly appreciated...

 

[xous]

Hi,

As a systems admin I do these kinds of moves daily and you really haven't provide enough detail to provide more than a general outline.

1) 24 hours before move reduce TTL values for DNS records
2) Copy all files and configure the domain on the new server.
3) Copy the databases and use a test domain to make sure it works* (does not work on with all sites)
4) Disable the site on the old server. This is a must for sites with user generated content. (forums, etc)
5) Move the databases again to make sure all changes have been moved over.
6) Make sure no files have been changed and move the ones that have.
7) Switch the name-servers over.

If your site is downtime sensitive.. i.e. it would cost you more than $100 in lost revenue per hour of down time. Hire a experienced system admin.

Btw: this is the wrong forum.

 

[MikePros2]

Thank you much xous, I am glad to hear from you (especially you are a system admin) I have asked this in other forums too but didn't get a detailed answer like you did here.
Well I tried to do what you have mentioned above but here I am stuck in steps 2 & 3 when you said

2) Copy all files and configure the domain on the new server.
3) Copy the databases...

well, for me, this is not as easy as it sounds , why ?
because, besides too many DB's (which means too many usernames and passwords) in the old one, there are other places where there are links such as www.old.com that are hard coded into the files everywhere in which they point to the links that we just moved therefore they need be updated too which I also did (by serach&replace) but how about other links like
forum.old.com
shop.old.com
mail.old.com
.
.
.
all these links were valid previously because they were valid subdomains in the previous site, but what about now, should I change all these as well? if the answer yes then here where I think that this is just a bezare thing to go through all these files and updating them manually.
I thought there maybe a way or a tool to do all these steps just automatically, but I am not sure ?

I was thinking if there is a way to just say backup everything from the old site using a relative path everywhere and restore the backup files into mysite with hope to change all the paths automatically or relatively to mysite. Is this possible at all ?

Thank you for your help in advance ....

 

[xous]

Hi,

If your using a control panel such as Plesk or cPanel you can simply take a full backup and it will handle moving the databases, logins, sub-domains, etc.

Unfortunately if you have absolute file paths such as /home/user/... and the path changes on the new server you will be in for quite a bit of manual work.

If your just worried about the URLs changing you should be able to just add the domains, sub-domains, etc as they were before and it should work fine.

You should always check with your new host as most provide free transfer in services.

 

[innovativenames]

use CPANEL full backup and then restore on new hosting