GreggHosting Migration System
To avoid data loss, sites that are often updated, such as e-commerce (WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads), membership, and community sites, must be put into maintenance mode during migration. This article covers how to migrate these types of sites using GreggHosting normal approach.
What is Maintenance Mode?
When a site is put into maintenance mode, it can no longer be updated. Installing a maintenance plugin from the WordPress.org repository is usually the way to go. However, if you wish to put the site into maintenance mode in a different way, that can be done as well.
A maintenance notification is displayed when the site is in maintenance mode, orders cannot be placed, users cannot register or change their accounts, and new content cannot be published.
What Is the Migration Process?
After we’ve enabled maintenance mode, we’ll migrate a copy of the site to our infrastructure. We’ll send you details on how to preview the site before it goes live after it’s finished.
The GreggHosting replica of the site will not be in maintenance mode. However, unless you alter your domain’s DNS records to link to GreggHost, it will not be publicly accessible.
This implies that your site will be in maintenance mode until you update your DNS and it becomes live on GreggHosting.
You should carefully evaluate the site after the migration is complete, test site operation, and then update your domain’s DNS records to point the domain at GreggHosting as soon as feasible.
Your website’s visitors will be able to continue placing orders, enrolling users, and publishing content as soon as DNS has been updated and fully propagated to the GreggHosting site.
How Long Will My Site Be In Maintenance Mode?
That’s a challenging topic to answer because there are so many factors to consider:
The size of your site.
Data transit speed between our infrastructure and the previous host.
The values for the time-to-live (TTL) associated with your DNS records.
How soon after the move is complete can you start reviewing your site?
How much time do you need to thoroughly analyze your site after the migration?
Any issues that develop throughout the migration procedure that are not anticipated.
Most migrations take between one and three hours as a general rule. Most clients will need between one and three hours to study the site after that. DNS propagation takes around an hour on average, but it can take much longer in some circumstances if your current DNS entries have prolonged TTL values. The propagation time with Cloudflare is substantially less, usually less than 10 minutes.
You can use this information to estimate how long your site will be down for maintenance, but please keep in mind that due to the factors listed above, we are unable to correctly anticipate how long your site will be down for maintenance.
How Can I Minimize Downtime?
There are a few strategies to cut down on downtime:
Schedule the migration for a time when you’ll be available to begin reviewing the site as soon as you receive notification that it’s finished.
Keep an eye out for a communication from our Engineers informing you that the migration is complete.
Reduce the TTL value linked with your domain to 5 minutes (300 seconds) 12 to 24 hours before your estimated migration timeframe to speed up DNS propagation. Note that after the site has loaded from our infrastructure, you’ll want to adjust this amount to one hour (3600 seconds). You don’t need to change the TTL values if your site uses Cloudflare.
Review our Knowledge Base article on how to preview a site on our infrastructure to learn about the technical steps involved in performing a post-migration review.
Review our Knowledge Base article on how to point your domain at GreggHosting so you’ll be ready to do so as soon as the migrated site is ready to go live.
What if this Process Doesn’t Work For Me?
If this approach isn’t going to work for your website, please contact our support staff using the My GreggHosting chat system when you’re ready to request your migration so that we can talk about other solutions.
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