Migrating your application between servers

1. Set a failover group

• On your dashboard click on "Failover Groups"
• Add a new failover group
• Choose application A as primary application
• Click on "add group"

2. Add a CNAME record in your DNS provider dashboard

To point at the address provided in the failover group and wait for 24 hours to propagate. While you are waiting for the DNS to get propagated you can follow the steps till step 8.

3. Database backup

On application A set backup for your databases.

4. Clone primary application

Visit the overview page for application A, click "Clone" from the right sidebar. This will allow you to choose a new application name and environment. Cloning your application will preserve any environment variables from the existing application, and also allows you to define where to deploy to along with other settings.

5. Add your database to backup application

Add database or all the databases you need on to the application B

6. Set up a replication between two applications

On application B go to Application Overview → database server (Redis, MySQL or etc.) and choose the server. On the right side bar click on "configure replication" choose application A (you have to be Administrator on application A otherwise it won't be listed). This makes application B databases replica for application A.

7. Add the second application to the failover group

to add application B as a backup to failover group, edit the related failover group and add application B as a backup application

8. Put the primary site in to maintenance mode:

• Go to the Application Overview for A
• Click on Configure Network / Redirects
• Check "Put application in Maintenance Mode" box
• Apply

9. Change the second database master

Do the step 6 but this time in the drop-down menu choose "No data source" (this makes B's db, master)

10. Switch to the new application

Go to the failover group and switch to B.

We recommend you keep the DNS on the failover group to make this procedure easy in the future.

11. [OPTIONAL] Switch your DNS record to the new application

You can now point your DNS to application B.

Migrating between data centers

Do you want to move your application from one cloud vendor or region to another? Follow the steps below for a seamless transition between hosts.

1. Reduce the TTL of your DNS to 5 minutes, and leave it for 24 hours so that it has time to propagate through the network.
2. Clone your source application and deploy it to the new datacenter. This will save any environment variables you had configured on the source application.
3. Use our database replication between applications feature to set up your target application as a database replica, which means that any changes to your source application database will be replicated across to the target application until you switch it off.
4. Use the database backup feature to backup your database and then manually restore it to the new application servers.

When you're happy with this new application, simply switch your DNS over to it. As the TTL is 5 minutes (set earlier), it should take effect quickly.

If you followed step 3a above, switch the target database from being a replica to a master (as outlined in the database replication between applications documentation).