Have you migrated a website before? If you have, you’ll be familiar with the difficulties associated with this kind of operation.

Two years ago, in March 2018, OVHcloud launched a major project: the migration of all web hosting clients hosted in its legacy Paris data centre to a new data centre: 3 million websites, hosted on 7,000 servers. Some of them had been running since 1999!

For nearly a year, we developed several migration scenarios. We extrapolated them in all directions, with two objectives:

·       the websites needed to remain functional after the migration

·       the impact on service availability during the migration should be minimal

In this talk, we will tell the story of the migration of those 3 million websites, and their associated files stores and databases. We will begin by explaining our web hosting infrastructure, then we will discuss our migration scenarios, and how we chose between them, and we will finish by telling you how the migration went: the long preparation work, the custom made tooling, the migration itself and the wonderful feeling when the plan came together.

Come to the talk to get some unique behind-the-scenes view of the largest-scale website migration carried out by Europe’s biggest hosting provider!