Moving from VPS to Actinic Hosting - email downtime

[meden]

Hi folks
I am in the process of moving my clients' site from my Webfusion VPS to Actinic Hosting (the site was very slow at busy times so I thought I'd let the experts take the strain)

The move has gone very well and without incident so far, site was up and running in a couple of hours and is much faster now.

It's now time to migrate the email across to the new server and was wondering what the typical email downtime is once I've amended the MX records accordingly?

I understand that it can take upto 48 hours to propagate fully but what are peoples' experiences in real life? Does it often take that long or is there a more realistic timeframe I can have some confidence in? We are looking to do the switchover on Monday evening if that makes a difference.

On the upside as the VPS uses Plesk and so does Actinic all that needs to change on the client machines are the email passwords - all other settings remain the same

Anybody been through this recently and can give me some pointers?

[TraceyHand]

Obviously email downtime isn't specific to any particular hosts but, in our (recent) experience, it did outlive the website propogation by a good few days.

Best solution is if you have non-domain server information for the domain, you should be able to have both side by side until such time as the old server isn't receiving any (this was around 7 days, in our case)
They were lonnnnnnnnnng days!

Beyond that time, you'll still (probably) experience problems when replying to email chains that have originated from the old host as it may attempt to reply via the original email settings (should be easily fixed by changing the replying account (if using software such as Outlook/Thunderbird) while responding to such emails)

[meden]

Thanks Tracey - I was hoping for a smooth and short transition but I guess I'll have to build in some sort of redundancy

[swardell]

Its not an easy one to move cleanly but we recently moved our own Actinic email from a 3rd party to in house and one of the tricks we used was to set up a catch all email address on the 'old' system' to forward everything to someotheremail@someotheraddress.com (for example set up a gmail account), during the transition anything still trying to get to the 'old' system will get forwarded to your gmail account and anything that gets the 'new' system will, well, you get the point

Its not exactly a technical or elegant solution but it does the job.

Other than that, make your DNS changes at the start of your least busy times.

[meden]

Thanks for that Steve - that's a very good idea!

[meden]

Ok, I thought I'd update the thread with how things went in the end and the steps we took to minimise any disruption, somebody may get some use from it in the future.

Remember we had moved the website from a Plesk control panel VPS with Webfusion to Actinic Hosting, again using a Plesk control panel, last week with no problems (although there seems to have been an issue with the .htaccess for some reason)

Tuesday 0900hrs I refreshed the website with the email address changed to a temporary one accessible via webmail under a different domain I own.

Redirected all the email addresses on the Webfusion VPS to the same temporary webmail address.

I had previously set up identical email addresses and enabled webmail access (with different passswords - though looking back I should have used the same ones) in the Actinic control panel and asked Actinic to switch on the email (you need to do this last step as Actinic don't enable it by default to ensure no email disruption when moving hosts)

I instructed the client to download any email to their Outlook clients then go into each account and change the password to the new one I gave them (the Actinic one) then close down Outlook to prevent the annoying 'enter password' pop up (this is why I wished I had thought to use the same passwords)

Checked that all emails placed through the site or to any of the company email address were being redirected to the temporary webmail address.

At 0915hrs I accessed the domain through the 123 Reg control panel and deleted the existing mail, webmail, and * 'A' records, then recreated them using the Actinic hosting IP addresses.

All went smoothly and by 1300hrs mail was appearing in the new Actinic webmail accounts, though the accounts still could not be accessed through email clients (so basically the webmail A record had propagated fairly well but the mail A record was still in the ether)

By 1500hrs I was able to access the new email accounts through Outlook (I'm in Yorkshire) but the client (in Gravesend) couldn't, also mail had stopped being redirected to the temporary webmail address.

by 1800hrs all the accounts were accessible through Outlook on the clients PCs.

Job done with minimal disruption and no lost email (or so it appears), the only thing to look out for now is any bounced back 'reply' emails, as Tracey pointed out the return path will have changed on a few emails.