Muffinresearch Labs by Stuart Colville

Moved to new server | 5 Comments

Posted in Muffin Research Labs on 18th November 2005, 5:01 pm by

Last night I moved muffinresearch.co.uk over to a new webserver hosted by Amenworld. Amenworld are currently unbeatable on price/value for dedicated servers and I’ve already used their services before for a client so I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending them.

To make the move without downtime, I copied the files from my old server to the new one and added the ip address of my new server to my hosts file for the domain muffinresearch. This meant I could point my browser at www.muffinresearch.co.uk and be looking at the new server. This works because every operating system checks it’s hosts file before querying a DNS server.

The transition to the new box went fairly smoothly once I’d got to grips with Plesk’s vhost.conf set-up. The vhost.conf file (/home/httpd/vhosts/<domain-name>/conf/vhost.conf) is a temporary location for apache directives that are written to the main configuration file (/home/httpd/vhosts/<domain-name>/conf/httpd.include) when you issue an update command.

If the vhost.conf doesn’t already exist you will need to create it first as root(touch /home/httpd/vhosts/<domain-name>/conf/vhost.conf). Next you can add your apache directives. Once you have saved the file you will need to merge the changes to the main configuration with this command:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng --reconfigure-vhost --vhost-name=<domain_name>

To complete those changes you also need to restart apache. I found it was preferable to do this from the command-line rather than via Plesk so that any error messages are visible.

service httpd restart

Should you need to create a domain alias to an existing domain, vhost.conf makes this very easy. Simply add he following to your vhost.conf:

ServerAlias alias1.domain.tld

Remember, every time you make a change to vhost.conf you need to merge the changes and restart apache.

Following the move there may be the odd screw-up so if you spot anything odd please let me know via the contact form.

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  • Nick Elliott

    DO NOT USE AMENWORLD!!! I have had no end of problems with webmail and webpro for over two years….now at last changing hosts. Really not impressed!

  • http://www.muffinresearch.co.uk Stuart

    @Nick: I’ve had no issues or complaints but then I am running dedicated servers, which means I am responsible for pretty much everything apart from the hardware.

  • Suzanne

    I must agree with Nick Elliot. Amenworld have been a disaster for me. I launched a new business website last week (cost £2000) and sent out marketing materials costing another £2000. Today, the server is still down – the 5th day this week and no one can access my site. Avoid them like the plague

  • http://muffinresearch.co.uk Stuart Colville

    @Suzanne: I feel your pain, I have recently moved to Dreamhost as a result of hardware failure causing crashes in the Amenworld server. See this post for more info

  • J Billings

    Currently they are hosting several spammers, and are completely unresponsive. Unless you’re a spammer (!), I suggest you go with a more legitimate company.

GNU screen: open tab in current working directory|(1)

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# Open new window in current dir.
bind c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"
bind ^c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"

Hat tip: mteckert on SuperUser.com

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When you’re using a minimal Ubuntu install if you find the ‘add-apt-repository’ command is missing (it’s useful for adding PPAs and other repositories), then simply run:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

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