FragSwitch: Hosting Tutorial: Upgrading - FragSwitch

Our tutorial this week will cover upgrading your hosting to manage your growing community.

Introduction
We have covered different types of hosting in a previous blog post, the lowest level of hosting being Shared Hosting, while the highest being a dedicated clustered solution. These tiers exist to allow web masters to save money on their web site by choosing a service level which fits with their web site size and usage.

Community and application hosting can be slightly different as most content is driven by server side programming and databases, this puts added strain on the server and means that these types of websites will face moving sooner than a static (plain HTML) site to allow other sites on the server to function as expected.

In these instances it helps when a community is hosted on a server which is not already overloaded, a practice employed by companies to maximise the profit margin per server. Companies that overload their servers put more accounts on the server than it can realistically handle. Overloading and overselling are not the same, but can often come together. Overselling is defined as selling more than the company can supply, as an example, a plan offering unlimited disk space is overselling as there is no such thing as an unlimited hard drive.

Service and size

The size of your community will have a direct impact on what level of service you require, and so will optimisation. Using a bulletin board which is highly optimised and uses caches more than database access, will allow the server to handle more users at any one time (also called concurrent users). Some bulletin boards and content management systems are not correctly optimised and require vast amounts of computing power to run, so it's always best to stay away from these products and research into what your community will be based around.

As a rule of thumb, Shared Hosting can handle several dozen concurrent users, semi-dedicated will handle more than that but is still a shared environment, while a dedicated server should handle several hundred depending on it's specification. As we've mentioned in an older tutorial, starting out you will only need a Shared Hosting account.

Upgrading and minimising downtime
It's important to your users when you can keep your site up and running, upgrading your service or changing provider can be a difficult task however there are ways of making it easier on yourself and your users:

• Take a back up of your site after you have restricted posting of new content, this means no posts will be left behind
• Tell your users about the move ahead of time and when they can expect to see the site running normally again
• Leave your old account running, just in case a user's ISP haven't updated their records, it's also good to leave a message saying that you have moved and if they are seeing it, that there's a problem with their DNS
• Plan your upgrade, and plan for problems, this will save you a headache if something does go wrong

If you know how to modify name server configurations, you can adjust the A record within the DNS zone to point towards your old server. It should look something like this:

Quote

Modifying the name server is useful as you can switch where the user is served from quickly, however, there may still be propagation issues.

Conclusion
Upgrading is a difficult task for a dynamic site, especially one with a lot of user interaction such as bulletin boards. Planning is essential when upgrading and it's always worth doing your homework ahead of time.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please feel free to contact us.