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Website Cutover and Lease Return of a Dedicated Server

Leasing a server is easy. Tons of providers are out there wanting your business. Prices range from $50/month to many hundreds $$$ per month with almost no limit at the top depending on which services you order. You order the server and it gets delivered ready to go. Great, but what happens when you return the server - be it because you are upgrading or swapping old hardware or because you do not need that dedicated server anymore?

You should start early planning for a lease return to make sure everything is working out as anticipated. After all you are dealing with your business data here. You need to plan for a good and smooth cutover + you need to delete data and even eventually scrub the server to prevent theft of your data.

For me a lease return starts with a DNS change across the board. DNS values come with a TTL (Time to live) value and the lower the setting the faster a DNS refresh from the client side has to happen. Usually the value is somewhere between 24-72 hours, but for when moving to a new server that value should be 15 minutes or maybe even less. This way you can easily change the IP address to the new server and within 15 minutes all traffic should be drained off the old server and going to the new site (some exceptions will always apply, but this method is pretty fool proof.

So, concentrating on the DNS change for this article, a smooth transition to a new server could look like this:

- Reduce TTL value for the website (all A + NS + MX + FTP records) to 900
- Let the website run at least 1 week in advance of the move with this new TTL value
- Schedule the cutover, pre-stage the site on the new server with all data
- Close the site and do a final data sync. Test. Test. Test.
- Change the IP address in the zone file of the old server pointing to the new IP address
- Re-open the website on the new server
- Install a 301 redirect on the old website
- Test new website again - including deep links and any database related activity
- Let website sit for at least 24-72 hours in this setup (DNS on old server, live website on new server)
- Change DNS Servers at the domain registry.

Following these steps has allowed me to literally move hundreds of websites with minimal or zero downtime. However, this is only possible with proper planning the move. Any good web host or system administrator should be able to assist in a website move to make it as seamless as possible.

Article Source: http://www.bo-knows.com

Christoph Puetz is a professional webmaster with long time web hosting experience - covering cheap web hosting as well as dedicated server web hosting.

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