By kalashari on

Heya all,

I will move my drupal site from shared hosting to VPS (since I got a notice from my shared hosting provider that my site is taking too much recources and is slowing down server). I dont have any experience with VPS before, so I'd like to know what's the best way to migrate Drupal site to VPS. I made whole site backup and DB backup.

Do I need to make a fresh installation of Drupal on my VPS, or can I just copy my site backup and DB backup over there, then try to set it up so it will fit new enviroinment?

btw which OS should I choose for my VPS: Debian, Fedora or CentOS?

If you have any pointers for me or documents I should read, I would appreciate it a lot.

Thanks

k.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

chiggsy’s picture

chiggsy commented

A VPS is , from your probably SSH view of it, the same thing as a dedicated server. I'm thinking once you have your webserver etc set up, and you've kept the paths the same, then it should just depend on how good your backups are no? Drupal really lives in the db ... so should not be a problem.

For OS, i'd suggest gentoo, but from your choices, and your words from above, i'd go with debian. You can argue about software installation all day but gentoo and debian have the best and easiest package managers. Debian's a bit more "stable" ( ie using ancient versions of software, that did not break under 1997 load )... and definitely more user friendly.

jodo’s picture

jodo commented

check it out. i moved a site with scp and it worked a champ.
ssh into the site where your drupal installation now resides and do something like this:

scp -rv /users/home/example/public_html/original_site username@newsite:/home/username/www/

it will ask for password on new site and then away it goes. copies all the sub-directories and files.

kalashari’s picture

kalashari commented

hmm.. I don't have ssh access on my current shared hosting, that's the thing. I will try consulting with technical support of a new VPS provider to see what's the best solution to transfer my site.

Thanks.

djflux’s picture

djflux commented

As chiggsy said, Drupal is mostly contained in the DB so as long as your backups are good, tarring up your current installation and restoring a DB backup should be all you need.

A suggestion on VPS hosting - make sure that the company you choose to use has a 30 money back guarantee. I went with a service that doesn't appear to have one and I'll be out one month cost ... only $30, but still. I'm going to be canceling my service with said company because the MySQL performance was abysmal. It took about 3 minutes (literally 3 minutes of real time watching the browser spin) to create to standard Drupal tables. This time was on a VPS with 512MB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. The host was a quad Xeon 2.8GHz with 8GB RAM.

I wanted to check to make sure this performance wasn't just a fluke so I just dropped my Drupal test DB and this was the result:

mysql> drop database drupal_test;
Query OK, 86 rows affected (19.45 sec)

19.45 secs to drop a DB with 86 rows. I get better performance on my PIII 933 with 512MB RAM and a slow IDE drive.

I've decided to up my cable modem from residential to business class with static and host my site myself.

To your choice of OS, that is definitely a personal decision. Use what you know. I started and learned on Red Hat so I use a RH derivative (CentOS). If your site is going to be production and used for business purposes, and/or you don't feel like upgrading the OS every 6-12 months, I recommend an enterprise-class distro - one that will receive security updates and bugfixes for at least 3-5 years. CentOS is my choice, but again, use what you know and what you're comfortable with administering.

scrypter’s picture

scrypter commented

company to do it for you! It would be a lot easier than ftp up and down and they are making more money out of you. You might have to do the db yourself. Do they provide any GUI front end? I believe we will see lots of this happening as sites outgrow shared hosting and Windoze (or non *nix) people get thrust into the Linux command line. They are nervous!

www.purpleoar.co.nz/scryptik - Javascript editor with syntax error checking
www.purpleoar.co.nz - Web development, Drupal consultancy

www.purpleoar.co.nz/scryptik - Javascript editor with syntax error checking
www.purpleoar.co.nz - Web development, Drupal consultancy