
Ask HN: Tool for Moving Hosting Providers (VPS's) - aogl
Over the years I&#x27;ve often found myself moving hosting providers between Linode, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, OVH, Vultr, etc, etc.<p>This is usually to make use of their ever shifting pricing savings.<p>Each time I have to move all the services and applications, crontabs, databases and data between machines.
Not a terribly hard task, but a repetitively annoying task that can take a few hours each time.<p>Is there a tool around that can do this for me, correctly?<p>Alterantively, what&#x27;s everyone&#x27;s feel for a tool like this should I make one. As I will definitely put together something in order to solve this problem for myself.
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riceo100
Tools for these kinds of migrations do exist, but the problem is split in to:

1\. The migration of your Applications & Dependencies: Let's say you have a
bunch of web applications in different frameworks. I imagine you would install
your favourite web server and language/framework dependencies, set up their
database servers then clone in your applications from their source control,
and install any db schemas. You could automate this entire process by using a
tool like Ansible to define the entire process in code. It requires a little
more investment initially but then in the future bootstrapping your entire
stack elsewhere is as simple as running the Ansible configuration on a fresh
VM.

2\. Migrating Persistent Data: I would probably use a tool like Rsync to move
any large data across providers to servers that have been configured as above.

As a Bonus, you could also use Terraform to provision the VMs in the new
hosting provider (assuming there's a provider for your chosen company). This
can fire API calls off to create the VMs, configure networking etc, then start
the Configuration Management tool like Ansible).

Having said that, there's a bit of learning to do to use these tools so I
could see some value in a simple tool for migrating VPS'. However, my gut
feeling is that you'll need some form of templating/understanding of the
changes between the old&new VPS' (even things as simple as IP address
changes), so it could be easy to end up reinventing the wheel.

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gupi
Exporting the entire VPS's in open format (ova ?) and importing them in the
new environment isn't an option? Are the machines too big ?

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aogl
Usually around ~100-200GB

