The story starts with a client from a certain country who contacted us via our Fiverr profile to discuss the pricey hosting nightmare they were going through. They had two high traffic websites hosted on an expensive cloud server on a certain cloud platform, and the bills were racking up so quickly. Time was running out for them to migrate the sites.
They had limited chance to leave the platform quickly before their sites were erased because of their failure to pay the huge bills that were pilling up every hour.
During the process of planning the cost-effective migration, they sought help from a certain hosting provider to do the job for them, since they had bought an enterprise-grade hosting plan that came with “theoretical promises” of free migration services and some kind of dedicated support. In theory, these kinds of incentives seem enticing, but that’s not what always happens in reality.
While most people prefer to host their sites with large hosting companies, the most common issue about them is, they have a customer support problem. Some of these companies are hiring cheap labor to handle their customers’ issues, and you will realize they can’t handle big and complex projects due to limited expertise.
Because the client believed in the theoretical promises of a dedicated support from the hosting provider team, they reached out to them, explaining in detail what needed to be done, which was to transfer their large sites from a certain cloud platform as quickly as possible. The sites to be transferred had massive traffic and the process had to be done flawlessly while at the same time minimizing the risks of prolonged downtime.
Even when they had been promised dedicated support, things became complicated. The support team from the client’s new hosting provider kept complaining about not being able to access the website files on the cloud server because of file permission problems. The client had given them full FTP & SSH access to the server, and so file permissions wouldn’t have been a big problem for them to figure out . They had high-privileged access to the entire system, but kept giving excuses to the client.
After spending countless days having unfruitful contacts with the new hosting provider team, the client realized a certain pattern in these interactions. In most cases, the “new hosting provider” support team chose to just ignore the client whenever they tried to reach out while trying to understand how far they had gone with handling the migration. The live chat sessions could initiate but the support specialists would just go in silent mode after like 2-3 chat exchanges. So, the client came to conclusion that the hosting provider support team was unreliable and incapable of migrating such large sites.
In the end, the client reached out to us through Fiverr for our tech and migration support services. They explained everything in detail, something that helped us to understand the complexity of the project.
The truth is, large-scale website migration is delicate and challenging. It’s even worrying when the site has dynamic content, and extremely large and complex databases. You have to get everything right and there is no room for errors when executing this kind of project. The process of downloading and uploading the files has to be flawless, fast and effective.
And this brings us to an important part of this story, which is, how did we handle this project?
We were eager to take on this work as soon as possible as the two sites for the client had massive traffic and they couldn’t wait any longer.
Just a quick reminder, the client’s websites were originally being hosted on a Cloud server from a certain platform, but they wanted to transfer them to their newly-acquired managed VPS hosting account in a move to cut down their hosting costs.
One of the significant challenges was dealing with the large amount of data. We knew that downloading and uploading the files would take a lot of time, so we had to come up with a better plan to ensure that the migration process was as smooth as possible.
We decided to fire up a high-speed Windows VM instance in the cloud to benefit from the high-speed data center internet for this project. This allowed us to set up uninterrupted high-speed FTP data transfer connection from the clients’ cloud server on which the websites were being hosted.
This particular strategy worked so perfectly for us as it minimised the migration costs and time. It also provided the download and upload speeds we needed to transfer large chunks of data.
Initially, we felt intimidated with fears of executing a failed migration, that would have resulted into a disaster, frustrations and bad reputation for us. But on the other hand, our confidence was in our expertise and experiences we have in successfully executing similar projects.
Another important aspect of this project was to make sure the site visitors didn’t notice any downtime during the migration process. We solved this issue by setting up a load balancing strategy using Ngnix . This meant that traffic would be re-directed to a different server on which the clone versions of the websites were being hosted during the migration process.
Now to get the sites running on the new hosting server, we had to use Cloudflare for DNS hosting. Our client’s domain names were from a third-party domain registrar. So, we had to add the Cloudflare nameservers as custom nameservers to the client’s domain registrar’s side. And then, we got the new hosting server IP address and bound it to the primary DNS records for the two domains. After we did this, the domain propagation process took less than 5 minutes. This was quick and impressive 🙂
And when the domain propagation had completed, we restored the sites by re-uploading the files using our high-speed windows server instance in the cloud that data center level internet connection speed. This took less than one and half hours and the job was executed successfully.
With the job done successfully, our client was happy with the way we did things. So, they gave us a 5-star review, and it touched our hearts.
Our team is always ready to take on any challenge, and we are equipped with the latest technology and skills to ensure that our clients’ projects are completed efficiently and effectively. We have a team of experts who have experience in different areas of technology, including cloud computing, web migration, development, data analysis, and more. We are so passionate about our work and solving complex problems for the clients gives us total satisfaction.
