General Discussion - domain propagation

domain propagation - helpful hints?

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Topic: domain propagation - helpful hints?

Posted By: sarumu1
Subject: domain propagation - helpful hints?
Date Posted: 09 February 2005 at 11:48pm

I'm likely going to transfer my hosting service in the near future. I've never done this before, and I'm looking to minimize heartache and downtime.

Any suggestions? Any useful resources?

Thanks, Subbu.

Replies:

Posted By: MadDog
Date Posted: 10 February 2005 at 2:00am

All you can do is transfer and wait... there is nothing you can do to speed it up.

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Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 10 February 2005 at 4:26am

I usually find it not to bad, but a few pointers I have picked up are:-

If you have mail boxes for your domain during the propagation time have them forwarded to a mailbox that is not part of your domain, like a Yahoo email account. This way you won't loose emails.
If you have any forums etc. that take and display user submission, turn the forum etc. off on the old server during the propagation time, so you don't loose posts.

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Posted By: sarumu1
Date Posted: 10 February 2005 at 9:12am

supposedly, during the switch, my site can be up using something called "instant access domain alias"

having a tough time finding that. anybody familiar with this?

Posted By: dj air
Date Posted: 10 February 2005 at 10:57am

this is a temp address used on the providers DSN records

ussually/ as im my server .. i have username.temp.emagineservers.co.uk

its something on those lines. not all hosts provide them but must do i belive

Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 13 February 2005 at 6:01pm

Mostly the instant access url is to help you test the site in it's new location before executing the actual move.

Since september, DNS changes for .com and ,net have been taking 15-60 minutes to propagate in the US. One hint is to put some unigue identifyer on the home page of the new location - like a small x at the bottom of the page - so you know where you're winding up when you go to the site.

I would still leave the old site up for a few days to allow for world-wide propagation of the new location.

If you're using sql server, and you have an ip address for it in the new location, you can run both sites pointing to the same db in the new location.

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Posted By: Emiliano
Date Posted: 14 February 2005 at 6:59pm

Hi!
I changed my forum host provider 2 or 3 times on the last 6 months. What I did was:

1) Prepared the data transfer from the old to the new host (I'm using MS-SQL db)

2) Once the DTS package was ok, I closed the forum.

3) I transfered all the data

4) Using the instant access address, I tested the forum

5) Once everything was ok, I changed the DNS records and set the default page (default.asp in my case) in the old address to redirect to the new "instant access address".

Update: Actually I edited the "forum_closed.asp" to redirect the traffic to the new forum and kept the old forum closed. ;-)

This way, every time someone hit the old server, they got redirected to the new provisory address. Once the DNS records propagated, they went straight forward to the new server. ;-)

The downtime was about 2 hours just while I transfered the data and tested the site. And I did everything very slowly. :-)