Migrating to a new VPS

If you're contemplating a major OS upgrade or re-installation, BitFolk may be able to offer you a new VPS temporarily running concurrently with your existing VPS, for you to migrate to.

Motivation

It is normally possible to upgrade a VPS in the same way that you would upgrade a normal server, and via the rescue environment you could theoretically install anything that boots under Xen, but sometimes this may not be convenient. It will take some time to set up your services again on a clean install.

For this reason, in most cases it is possible for BitFolk Support to provision you a new VPS account to run concurrently with your existing VPS, for you to install and migrate onto.

Requirements

• The additional VPS can be provided for free for a maximum of two weeks. After this time BitFolk will need to charge you for it. This will be on a monthly basis (unless you ask for quarterly or yearly).
• You will need to pick a new account name for the new VPS that you will migrate to. Changing account names is quite hard, so you'll need to keep the new account name afterwards.
• Your new VPS will require new IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
• You will need to do the operating system install yourself using the self-serve installer or rescue environment.

Migrating IP addresses over to a new VPS

Customers often request their old IP addresses to be migrated over to the new VPS afterwards. This is possible but is less useful than you may think:

• You will need new IP addresses anyway while you are running the two VPSes concurrently.
• As soon as BitFolk takes your old IP addresses away from your old VPS, your services will be unavailable until you have them configured on your new VPS. Therefore this will require coordination of your work with BitFolk's.

You may find it easier to ensure that your services are working correctly on the new IP addresses that you've been assigned, and then change any DNS records so that users are pointed to your new VPS. If there is a problem you can then change the DNS records back.

On the other hand, if there are many DNS records or other uses of your old IP addresses that you can't control then it may indeed be easier to bring your old IP addresses over. You'll need to coordinate a time to do this with Support.

Getting started

If you would like to migrate to a new VPS, please contact support with the following information:

• Your new account name
• The desired configuration (RAM, disk, data transfer) of your new VPS, or just let BitFolk know that it should be the same as your existing one.

If the specifications are increased then there will be extra to pay; if they are decreased then that may only be able to take effect from your next contract renewal.

• When you would like it made available to you, if not as soon as possible