How To Upgrade to Professional Hosting

A Step-by-Step Guide to Migrating from 34SP.com Personal Hosting to a New Professional Hosting Account

With the popularity of our new Professional Hosting account, many existing users are clamouring to convert over from Personal Hosting. If you are still not convinced that you should upgrade you may want to check out this side-by-side comparison of Personal and Professional Hosting. The most commonly asked question we see regarding the transition is this:

”Exactly how can I switch over to Professional Hosting with the minimum of fuss and downtime?”

Step One
You need to purchase your new Professional Hosting account as a new account: https://www.34sp.com/order-professional.

Personal and Professional run on very different back end systems. The overall process is not a simple upgrade of services, but a complete migration of your account and services to a number of brand new servers. This improves reliability, performance and the services we can offer you.

Step Two
You now need to wait 24 hours and then contact us via email or telephone. We don’t migrate services over as standard and need you to tell us to do this first. If you email us, be sure to do so from a different address to that of the new professional hosting account domain name.

The 24 hours allows us to shorten your DNS records. This means when we migrate your services, downtime should be limited to no more than one hour in total.

Step Three
Sit back and relax. After the one hour or so of downtime passes, we encourage you to look carefully over your account. Whilst the migration process is very robust and has already been tested on many hundreds of domain names, we want you to be 100% sure that everything is to your liking. If you are still happy 24 hours after the move, get back in touch and we will then close down your old Personal Hosting account.

Once we close down your old Personal Hosting, we will convert any remaining paid time into account credit on your new account. This can then be used to offset future Professional Hosting payments and means you don’t lose out for any past fees paid.

Step Four
Welcome to Professional Hosting! A far more powerful hosting solution, with increased security, reliability and resources. We are sure you will love your new hosting account. If there are any more features you would like to see on the account, just get in touch. Happy hosting!

Other Points to Consider

PHP5 and MySQL 5: Professional Hosting uses both of these. Do make sure your scripts are compatible with these latest versions. If they are not you should strongly consider updating your script or switching to a newer alternative. Older software versions are notorious for security holes.

Hard coded paths: If you hard code any paths in your scripts, do check with us for the new paths. For example: /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/DOMAIN becomes /var/www/vhosts/DOMAIN.

34SP.com php.cgi script: will need replacing with the phpfastcgi variant. If you tell us before the migration, we can do this on your behalf. You can find this script at: http://scripts.34sp.com/phpfastcgi1/.

Mailbox limits: Do be aware that until you finalise the closure of your personal hosting, you will be limited to the personal account mailbox limit.  The professional limits kick in when the old account goes offline.

Don’t forget that in addition to world class hosting, 34SP.com also offers great prices on UK domains at just £5 per year.