Overview
This article explains how to manually move a domain from a Shared server to a VPS or Dedicated Server.
Copying your files
You can manually migrate your web files from your server using SFTP or rsync. If you have less than 1GB of files to move, it may be easier to use SFTP.
Manually migrating files via SFTP
- Connect to your shared web server using instructions from the FTP article.
- Download all content from your website to your local computer.
- Create a new user on the VPS or Dedicated Server. Visit the Creating a user with Shell (SSH) access article for details.
- Connect to your new server.
- The hostname for a VPS is psXXXX.dreamhostps.com.
- The hostname for a Dedicated Server is dsXXXX.dreamservers.com.
- Use the new username and password created for the user on the server.
- Upload the website files for your domain to the server into the domain’s directory.
Manually migrating files via rsync
- Create a new user on the VPS or Dedicated Server. Visit the Creating a user with Shell (SSH) access article for details on creating this user.
- Find the full path to your new VPS and its new user.
- For example, if your server is named ps123456 and the new user you created is named 'exampleuser', the path to the server is:
- exampleuser@ps123456.dreamhostps.com:/home/exampleuser
- Log into your shared server via SSH.
- Run the following command to copy your data from your shared user to your new server user.
In the following example, shareduser and exampleuser would be your Shell users, and example.com would be your website.
There are two paths to this command:
- /path to shared domain folder
- /path to server user
DO NOT put a trailing slash after the path to the shared domain folder. Doing so only copies the contents inside this folder, not the folder itself.
[server]$ rsync -e ssh -av /home/shareduser/example.com exampleuser@ps123456.dreamhostps.com:/home/exampleuser/
- Enter your server user's password.
- Press Enter to continue with the rsync. Once complete, your shared domain's folder and its contents are copied to your new server user.
Changing the user assigned to the domain
The final step is to adjust which username is assigned to the domain in your panel. View the Migrating a single website to a different server article for instructions. When switching the user, make sure to leave the checkbox Move files to a new user? disabled.
When you move your domain from a shared server to another server, your site's IP (and thus its A record) changes. This means that after any DNS change, the records must propagate online.
- If your domain uses DreamHost’s nameservers, then the domain’s IP is updated automatically. In your panel, you can see all the DNS records set up for any site you host at DreamHost.
- If your domain does not use DreamHost’s nameservers, you must manually update your DNS records at the company where your nameservers are hosted.