I’m looking to transfer the ipaddress for my site from one ip address to another. Reading through the Register.com documentation it says that it may take awhile for the DNS changes to replicate/propogate.
Since this transition includes a different sql database, how do I force the update so I don’t lose any data that may be add/updated during the transition period?
Welcome to the web hosting shell game.
First, you can drop your dns TTL to something absurdly low — we use 60 seconds when we are about to move things. That said, not everything honors your TTL value.
A lot depends on specifics but there are a few ways to do this. Probably the most effective would be to push the front end out to a proxy, have that proxy back-haul to your current site then, when ready, repoint the proxy at the new host. I would suggest using a service such as cloudflare as the proxy rather than handling it yourself.
Another approach would be to use a second, temporary domain name while things propigate. To do so setup your new app to listen on new.example.com as well as www.example.com; then when ready setup the old server to redirect all requests to new.example.com. Give it a day or so then setup the new server to redirect new.example.com to www.example.com so you keep a cannonical domain name.
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