I have a website, hosted on a Shared Hosting plan at 1and1, and recently I've got a Virtual Server, because I aim to transfer the website to a bigger server.So the process I will be doing is:Copy Files from one server to the other.Transfer domains from one server to the other.Recreate all emails address in the new server, almost 100 accounts.The problem I see is, recreating the email accounts means that for at least 1 hour or more, the whole company will be without email, and the emails lost will impact the business and customer satisfaction.So I'm wondering, how could I approach this issue in order to minimize the impact on the business?I know I could do it on a Sunday, but the company works with customer service so it could be really possible that they get emails at any time, any day.I have been thinking about creating a catch all email account in server one, delete all email accounts, then transfer the domain, and create a catch all email in the other server, then recreate all email accounts, get all emails that arrived into the catch all email and forward individually to each different address.
How to reduce impact moving a website to a different server?
web hosting;best practices;transfer;email accounts
Make the change off hours. Sunday morning (a.k.a midnight) is typically the best time to do it as that is when there is usually the fewest users using the system. It's also when you will receive the fewest emails.Announce your downtime. Naturally downtime is bad but when you tell your users to expect it, it usually isn't a problem. An email to user and/or a notice on your website should suffice. Also, have a maintenance page up during the change so users who forgot or didn't know about the downtime will be aware of why the site is unavailable. This should reduce support requests.Your old emails will still be available to you after the change so you don't need to do anything drastic to the system. After the switch use your old IP address to access those emails. 