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#1 2019-11-06 01:07:09
- SunFoxNC
- Member
- Registered: 2015-09-04
- Posts: 80
Changing hosting providers with Backlight 2...
When I started with CE4 and Backlight three years ago, my photography site was hosted with Bluehost as the suggested hosting. Since then, I've grown out of shared hosting and had to get a VPS with Inmotion for an application I was supporting and the fact that Lunarpages which I had been with for many years was now completely flaking out.
Needless to say, I wasn't looking forward to moving redvixen-studios.com until the term ran out on Bluehost...i.e. until I absolutely had no choice!
Major kudos to Matthew and Ben and their architecture of Backlight 2 as well as a couple of posts here in the support forums by Rod...the migration turned out to be breathtakingly simple:
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1. Backup the entire site to a local drive via FTP.
2. Provision a CPanel account for redvixen-studios.com on the VPS server.
3. ZIP the local backup and FTP it to a temp directory on the VPS server. If the file is huge, you'll definitely want a FTP client that can resume uploads where it leaves off when the connection gets dumped every now and then. Studios was about 17GB...it took 14 hours to back up and about 10 to upload the ZIP file over a cable modem connection.
4. Use FileManager in CPanel to extract the uploaded backup archive file into public_html.
5. Point DNS to Inmotion's name servers and let the changes propagate through the net. The top-level name servers updated almost instantly but Spectrum took about a day before they took the hint.
At this point, the site was 95% functional with only the menu items for home/about/contact pages being broken.
This turned out to be caused by Bluehost defaulting to PHP 7.3 whereas the VPS was only provisioned up to PHP 7.2. One quick run through EasyApache 4 to clean out the old PHP versions and add 7.3 and then update all of the domains to use PHP 7.3 sorted that problem.
Updating the PHP version broke the top-level .htaccess by clearing out the Backlight rules...easily fixed by copying them back in via the local backup.
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It's nice having that site moved to its new home and Publisher has no idea that it's on a much better provisioned server! 
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#2 2019-11-09 15:22:46
- Ben
- Moderator
- From: Melbourne, Australia
- Registered: 2012-09-29
- Posts: 4,399
Re: Changing hosting providers with Backlight 2...
Thanks for sharing your success story with us Moving sites like this seems to be a lot easier than it did a few years ago. We'd often encounter a conflict of permissions between the files that are uploaded via FTP and those that are created or modified by the web server (image uploads, album files, database files). Many (or most?) hosts now have configured their web servers to give server-created or modified files the same ownership and permissions as user-created/uploaded files via FTP.
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#3 2019-11-10 07:59:34
Re: Changing hosting providers with Backlight 2...
Awesome story! Thanks for sharing! We do love to hear when things go well. 
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