Tips When Moving Production Domain Names and Websites

Often when moving a production website (possibly powered by eZ publish) you face a problem, moving to a new provider you want to minimize the down time experienced by your customers and visitors.

In some situations no one knows you exist, your a new site, or a new sub-site so you have a bit more freedom (to take your time or learn).

In other situations time is critical and you must move a store (source code and database) to a new provider, along with moving DNS to a new provider, configuring the new server and configuring the application to run on the new server ...

You run into a real problem, you can access the server by ip address but not by the desired domain name (as those changes are in the process of propagating (delivered) to the rest of the internet).

Yet to test the website you may need to access it via a domain name ...

Well, here’s what you do ...

Configure your computers host file

• On Linux/Unix - usually /etc/hosts
• On MacOS X - try here
• On Windows - %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

To statically point the new server’s ip address to the hostname / domain name

Example Host file addition:

192.168.0.3 example.ezpublish.com example2.ezpublish.com

You can add several hostnames after the IP address, as well as have multiple lines for the same IP if required.