Move Website Hosting with MediaTemple SiteMover

CSS-Tricks has always been hosted on MediaTemple. It started out on their inexpensive grid service (gs). In all honesty, I was never a huge fan of (gs). It eventually outgrew (gs) and I moved it to their dedicated virtual (dv) service and I’ve had very few issues in the many years it has been there. Nothing major and nothing they couldn’t quickly resolve. They have pretty great customer service, including paying attention on Twitter (all too rare).

MediaTemple is now declaring EOL (End of Life) for the 3.0 and 3.5 versions of the (dv) service. Their main reasoning is that the installed version of Plesk, the server management software on those servers, is also being EOL’d by the company that makes it. I’m not sure why Plesk can’t be upgraded, but nonetheless, I’ve been wanting to move everything to a 4.0 (dv) because they are more badass anyway. They are more upgradable, faster in general, running newer software, and, you know, not going away.

Dreading the Move

I have 20ish sites between two (dv)’s. My process would likely be:

I’d use FTP to download all the files from each of the sites (I don’t yet have every single site on my servers with complete version control).
Re-upload them to the new server. That would probably mess with a bunch of file permissions and be slow as dirt.
Google for the 100th time the exact terminal commands to export a database as a mySQL file (30-40 of those).
Log in via Plesk again and use the file browser thing to download those files.
Upload them to the new server and figure out the commands to make new databases and import the data. During that process I’d probably screw up character encodings or something else weird and crazy that’s never happened to me before.
Switch the DNS to point at the new server. But first I’d forget to set the “time to live” on the DNS to a short period, so when it screwed up and I had to re-point back at the old site, it would take 24 hours each time. (more…)