Moving To And From FediHost

A key philosophy of the fediverse is the freedom to move which means most hosting providers like FediHost are pretty good about facilitating migrations. With FediHost it's easy to export a complete copy of your data from the control panel.

Moving to FediHost from another place is largely depended on your current provider.

Migrating A Single Account

If you currently have an account on another server and want to start hosting your own instance you can create a Mastodon or GoToSocial instance and use the tools built into Mastodon and GoToSocial to migrate your account.

Moving A Whole Server

If you currently have an instance hosted elsewhere and want to move to FediHost this is situation dependent.

Remember that you can't migrate a server to a different domain, your domain name has to match exactly.

Downtime & Cost

The length of downtime is a large part of what determines the price.

High Downtime

FediHost has a day we do high downtime migrations once a month. Typically this is for small instances where you can have up to serval days of downtime during the process.

Days!? This is usually dependent on the size of the instance. Large databases and media archives take a long time to download, upload and initialize. A typical instance is usually migrated within 24 hours though.

To do a high downtime migration to FediHost you will need an account with $500 of credit on it.

$500, even for a small solo instance!? Yes. Unfortunately we found out the hard way that it takes an average of 5 hours to migrate an instance. We have to ensure that the customer will use our services long enough to justify a substantial investment from one of our devops engineers.

Low Downtime

Low downtime migrations are carefully orchestrated with the client and take a number of days to script, plan and execute. Typically this is the option for larger instances and enables downtimes of between 2-8 hours done during off-peak time times for your users.

Low downtime migrations to FediHost depend on a number of factors but typically cost anywhere from $2500 to $5000. These costs are usually rolled into a custom enterprise contract and paid off over time.

Move Preparation

Before moving we need to check that everything will work.

1. Check Backups are Available

Check that you can download or export a copy of your data from your existing provider and that you are able to put all the files into a zip archive.

To increase your chances of success please read this whole article and look at the migration failure section. You can increase your chances of success by updating your software and testing your archive before sending.

2. Create a FediHost Account

Create a FediHost account and add payment details for your new instance. Skip the step where you choose the domain so that your service remains in the "Setup Needed" state.

3. Request Migration

Email support@fedihost.co requesting a migration.

Use the same email address to create your FediHost account as you have been emailing support with so we know who you are.

• We will pause any charges on your account until after you have migrated
• We will give you a "moving day" when you can migrate your instance and ask you to confirm that your credit card will be billed for $500
• Once you confirm the moving day you credit card will be billed for $500

4. Prepare Domain For Moving Day

For moving day to go smoothly you should update the TTL record on your domain to 600 ahead of time. This ensures that that the domain migrates immediately when you point it at FediHost in future.

Moving Day

Moving day starts at 7am Eastern Standard Time. On moving day we work quickly through a number of steps to get instances migrated across as soon as possible.

5. Disable Your Old Instance

At this time you will disable your old instance to prevent new data and records from going into its database and storage.

Check that your instance is not accessible at your domain. Throughout this process do not restart your instance.

6. Download Backup and Send to FediHost

Download a final backup of your old instance and send it to FediHost. Ensure that everything is in the backup including media and database files.

If downtime doesn't matter to you and you want to be first in line, you can always send us your backup the day before.

If you send us your backup later than 9am Eastern Standard Time on moving day there may be delays in migrating your instance.

If you have a larger instance remember to factor in the time to download, archive and upload the data so that you make it before the 9am cutoff

7. Migrate Your DNS Settings

While FediHost is setting up your instance you should migrate your DNS. On your DNS provider update the records to match the table which the FediHost control panel generates. The settings depend on if you are using a subdomain or a top level domain.

DNS Issues? Read our troubleshooting guide

8. Migration Success/Failure

In the next 48 hours you'll have a result.

Success

Provided no significant barriers are encountered your instance should be up and running once the DNS has migrated and your data is restored. After testing everything is working correctly for a few days your old instance can be deleted.

Failure

Failed migrations happen for a large number of reasons such as:

• Corrupted or missing files in the backup
• Database structure not matching
• Outdated software

When this occurs you can switch your domain back to the old hosting and turn the instance back on. At this point we will refund your credit and give you an estimate to resolve the issue using our standard rates.