Moving to a different datacenter and downtime

The best way to minimise the downtime of you linode being turned off is to make your disk images as small as they can be, that way the migration that will be setup for you will only have to transfer actual data and not empty disk space that you can recreate later when you resize any moved images.

As for DNS this is not my area of expertise so I don't care to speculate. Good luck.

I was thinking of creating a second node, move everything over myself and remove the old one when I'm done. It seems like this would be the safest approach and should cost only slightly more for the prorated time in days that I have 2 nodes.

Is that not recommended?

That's a lot more work. Is your data really so big that the migration will take longer than a couple of overnight hours?

I have a service running on the node that is being used from an iPhone app. I see requests at almost all hours of the day so I would like to keep my users happy by minimizing the downtime.

I'm not worried about the data, more worried about the effects of getting a new IP and how long my user's DNS cache will point to the old IP.

I guess I can try to minimize that by setting a low TTL ahead of time..

@vadim:

I was thinking of creating a second node, move everything over myself and remove the old one when I'm done. It seems like this would be the safest approach and should cost only slightly more for the prorated time in days that I have 2 nodes.

Is that not recommended?

Personally that's the way I'd do it, the little extra cost is worth providing continuous service.

The inter-DC migration to a new host is only something that you should do if you've got a window where a few hours downtime isn't an issue.

I can speak to this since I have done both recently.

I moved to second Linode about a year ago. Switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu. As expected I bought the second Linode, set it all up. The main problem was e-mail. Since that is hard to test without the real domain pointing to it. t was a huge hassle of course, took me a few weeks and moving the data and my users was a pain. Your experience might be less. When I moved a domain I would drop the TTL on the domain name to 1h a few days before. Then change the IP in DNS, having sites up at both locations. These are simple static sites. I would take down Forms and such and have them up on the new one only. With a notice on the old one that we are moving try back soon.

This did give me the least amount of downtime. One an hour at the most.

I moved Datacenters from Texas to California so my Linode is closer to me and my users. I have about 20GB and it took 10-15 hours for the migration to copy over. It got a new IP whcih I doid the same thing in the DNS, setting TTL to 1h days before and switching the IPs in DNS during the move. This was a lot less painful form me, but the sites were just gone! since the old Linode was down and the new one was up.

If you migrate, a word of warning. After you put in the support ticket to Migrate and they set you up. Do not reboot! This will give your Linode the new IP and it will no longer work, This is what happened to me as I was about a day away from wanting to Migrate (Overnight) so I had to go during the day. Oh well. Water under the bridge.

So…

Least pain/problems: Migrate

Least downtime: build a new Linode.

Good luck!