What is the best way to move a ecommerce website with a SSL to a VPS server. Does anybody know of any online instructions to move the website smoothly.

Anybody with some advice please respond. The host company wants to charge $200

Do a simple back-up of all of your files and folders, including the SSL certification. Login to the new server and upload. I think the only fee you would pay for is installing SSL, unless you are already know how to do that.

yep, just do a backup and then transfer it to the VPS.

You'll need to regenerate the SSL certificate on the new server - make sure its assigned its own dedicated IP before you do so. Then reinstall the certificate.
Thats the only thing thats outside the norm of backup site from old location - upload site to new location.

So I should backup my SQL data base and the website files and transfer those 2 right?

yes.
If you have cpanel and are moving to another cpanel account you can use the backup zips.

The host you are moving to wants to charge you $200? Find a different host.

I have done the same thing and I just FTP'd it over to my new server.

This process is usually MUCH faster because you are using their 100mbit/1gbit lines to do so, and takes you out of the equation and your bandwidth completely.

__________________
If you need any sort of programming work done, websites, custom bots, please PM me.

If the new site has identical path naming conventions, you can do what others have suggested. But don't assume it. Yes, SQL backup is the most important part, as your data won't be captured with an FTP file transfer.

What control panel do you have?

What? No.

SSL Certs are based on the domain. I just moved 20 ssl certs from one server to another.. I didn't have to regenerate them.

I just finished moving 50 sites over to a new pimp box.

Tools I used:
mysqldump dbname > dbname.sql
tar -zcvf
sftp

It depends on your configuration.


All of my instructions below assume you have at least shell access to the machine. That means you can ssh to the server , login, and get a bash/sh prompt to run interactive commands..


The first step would be to configure the target machine with the same software as your current machine.

Make sure you have the right version of PHP/Perl, any perl modules, any PHP extensions, zend optimizer, etc.

Then you want to backup your database. The easiest route would be at shell level using mysqldump.

The arguments for mysqldump are:

mysqldump -u Username -p DBNAME > DBNAME.SQL

replace Username with your mysql username
replace DBNAME with your database name to backup
this will run mysqldump and redirect all output to DBNAME.SQL .
FTP / SFTP / whatever the file to your new machine.

After all that is done, you'll want to use tar to archive your web directory.

I don't know your file paths or what folder your webdir is in.

So if it's in /home/user/public_html ,

tar zcvf sitebackup.tgz /home/user/public_html

This will create a file sitebackup.tgz in the current directory of all the contents of /home/user/public_html..

Copy/Ftp/sftp that file to the new machine.

Now you'll also need to copy over your SSL Certificate, SSL Server key, Root Certificate/Certificate Authority bundle files.

The easiest way to find those is to check out your apache config.
Look for:
SSLCertificateFile /path/to/file/file.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/file/..
SSLCACertificateFile /path/to/file...

Copy those .

You might want to take this time to copy the apache configuration directives you have..

ahh fuck it, pay 200$

Yes, I made the mistake of initially using a shared IP address on my VPS, you need a single IP address to make it work. Extra IP addresses are usually very cheap to add to your account, I got 4 more for an extra 50c a month.

HUH? Seriously? Maybe for multiple SSL certs.. I use one ip to host 200, 25000 subdomains domains and 1 ssl cert no problems.