How to transition from VPS to dedicated servers with minimal downtime?

Question

i am about to start an online service and am expecting good traffic, hence i am thinking of starting off with VPS servers. However, my question is when the traffic of the site increases to such an extent that the scaled up version of of VPS server cannot handle it.. Then at that time to switch to a dedicated server or a co- location would be difficult right.. because at that time the entire database will have to be transferred to the new location.. this will involve a major downtime for the site..

How is such situation handled so that the downtime involved is minimal ?

Answer 1

In this situation depending on the database I would make a copy and transfer the copy to the new server. Depending on the connection to/from the new/old Datacenter and the size of the database this could take hours, if not days.

This however runs the risk of your visitors seeing stale data on both the old and new servers. You don’t specify what your database dose. If it is a low transaction database that isn’t changed much you may get away with it.

I think the only people that will know the impact is yourself. You need to plan for downtime even if you anticipate there will not be. Always plan for downtime.