A Closer Look Into Our Washington DC to New York City Migrations

Posted By: Brian Farrell

Last Updated: Wednesday December 13, 2017

If you’re a shared, reseller, or semi-dedicated customer hosted in our Washington DC datacenter you’ve probably received an email about an upcoming migration to our new New York City facility. If you haven’t yet received the email yet don’t worry, one will be coming soon enough, just in time for the holidays! This post will provide a bit more insight on what’s going on and what you need to do to keep your sites online through the migration.

Our New Home! Our New York City Home!

Washington DC has served as our East Coast datacenter for well over 10 years now, in fact it was the second location Hawk Host offered after we expanded outside Dallas. While we’ve been nothing but pleased with the facility and network our presence there has grown and it came time for an infrastructure change. After months of research, tests, and discussions we finally found a new home right in the heart of downtown Manhattan in New York City!

Our New York City datacenter is every bit as reliable and connected as Washington DC. Not only was this migration necessary from the perspective of future growth but the new hosting platform is extremely fault tolerant, scalable at the click of a button, and is configured to make sure no single resource (CPU, disk IO, RAM, etc.) can be exhausted and cause performance issues. Put simply New York City is the most advanced hosting platform we’ve ever offered!

The new hosting infrastructure we’ve engineered affords us the luxury of offering an entirely new tier of hosting services. We’ll be making an official announcement about that in the coming weeks but we know it’s something you’ll all be very excited to learn about! (Hint: it’s where our mascot would fly if he could!)

Anyone looking to test their speeds to the new network can do so using the following resources:

Test IP: 172.96.186.146 Speedtest URL: Click Here! 10MB Download File: Click Here! 100MB Download File: Click Here!

As for the migration itself, here’s the important information you should know!

Q: I’m using Hawk Host nameservers for all my domains, do I need to change anything on my side?

A: Nope! If your domains are using our nameservers (nsX.hawkhost.com) you’re being taken care of automatically. We will change all your DNS settings, including your IP, so everything is hosted from the New York City servers once your account is migrated.

Q: I’m using third party nameservers. What do I do?

A: If you’re using a third party DNS provider then you would need to update your DNS records once the account was moved. As soon as your account is on the new server you’ll receive a confirmation email which includes information about your new server, including the new IP. At that time you will want to change your DNS records to make sure your sites are pointed to the new network.

Q: Will there be any downtime or data loss due to these migrations?

A: You should not experience any downtime or data loss due to these migrations. We have successfully completed migrations of this nature multiple times in the past and have developed a very reliable method for moving the accounts safely.

Q: What if I need to access the old server after I’ve been migrated?

A: This is possible but only for a limited period. When we do migrations of this nature we generally leave the old (in this case Washington DC) machines online for approximately 48 hours after the server has been migrated. At that time we disable services, such as cPanel and the webserver, to make sure it stops serving traffic. You can always contact us and ask if it’s possible to access the old machine.

Q: I haven’t been notified of a migration and I’m hosted in Washington DC. Am I going to be moved?

A: We’ve tiered the migrations so that only a handful of servers are moved per week. If you haven’t been notified yet don’t worry, it’s coming, and you’ll be enjoying our fancy New York City location in no time.

Q: I’ve still got questions, where do I go?

A: Send us an email or submit a ticket through your client area with your concerns or questions. We’ll be happy to clear up any doubts you may have! :)

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