[SOLVED] Best Practice CBSubs advice on transferring hosting accounts

What is the best advice / procedure for managing a transfer of a website between web hosting platforms? First of all to ensure no notifications get registered on the old site, no user registrations, user renewals, etc. Obviously it takes 24-48hrs for propagation of domain names between hosts.

Hi Joomlapolis Support, I was hoping that I may get some sort of simple answer from you guys.

The question I asked is legitimate and will affect other users who may be migrating sites between hosts. The question is specifically around not impacting CBSubs, registration and PayPal/Payment notifications.

If I were to migrate a website to a new host, is the advice to simply disable the CBSubs plugin completely, and disable registrations at Joomla end? At least until after the domain has propagated across? Then copy the site across?

This can be extremely tricky. If you have recurring subscriptions you flat out will lose all of them. They are all tied to a domain for their notifications. So what you first have to do is go into your PayPal business account for example and cancel all the recurring subscriptions. This will stop auto renewing and sending notifications.

Once that's done you'll want to do the domain change very quickly so ideally already have the new domain setup and pointing to your site. Now you need to reconfigure your PayPal account to point to the new domain.

Another option is to continue to own both domains, but point your old domain to the new domain. This could work to avoid having to lose all recurring subscriptions, but I don't know for sure as never tested that.

OK. There is no way I can afford to cancel recurring payments. we have already done that once to fix some issues a year or so back.

I am not sure if you misunderstood what I am intending to do. All I am doing is changing my physical hosting platform, not my domain name.

The delay impact is the time it takes the domain to propagate across to the new DNS servers. So my assumption was that I could:

On live site:

1. Disable CBSubs plugin, so no notifications could be received,
2. Set site offline;
3. Change DNS Servers on Domain
4. Physically backup and restore site to new server

On new site:

5. Restore site on new location
6. Enable site (make online) at new location
7. Test new site
8. Enable CBSubs plugin so that as soon as domain is propagated site becomes available to users, paypal, etc.

Actions 1-3 can be done consecutively in minutes.
Actions 4, and 5 below may take an hr to complete.

I have already tested the transfer process itself.

Would this work?

I would do 4-8 first and make sure the new server is up and running fine. Once that's done do 1-3. Then it's just a matter of waiting for DNS propagation, which shouldn't take long. If any renewals or purchases happen during that just manually fix those, but I recommend doing 1-3 during a low traffic day and also checking to make sure no renewals will be coming through in the next couple of hours.

Just for the record and others who may be migrating sites between hosting platforms. This process worked well. One point though that made it faster was to update A, CNAME and MX RECORDS on the domain name to reduce TTL, which is believed to speed up the DNS propagation. I reduced these from 144000 to 9600. Propagation did seem to be faster.