By all means ask for the same IP address as this should not change
if you were shared you had an ip and they can transfer it over to the new machine

be sure and have them set it up under another test ip before moving it over test eveything u can think of have some kid that tears things up ty to find a problem with the move over under the testing ip then we satisfied with the new machine site is right etc all u need to do is change the ip and you don't miss a beat...

O yes congratulations to the move it show your progress

By all means ask for the same IP address as this should not change

This may not be possible.

Shared hosting can give sites dedicated IP addresses, or can used a shared IP address for all sites on the shared machine.

I'd imagine the latter is more common than the former, especially with low-priced plans.

So, be prepared for a new IP address. Familiarize yourself with DNS. It's useful to lower the TTL (time to live) in advance of the switch, to a small value - perhaps as small as 5 minutes. Once you make the switch in DNS, this will minimize the period of confusion, where users might get one IP address or the other. Once the switch is accomplished, you can raise the TTL to a more typical value.

Find out what administrative tasks you will now be responsible for that you were not before. While you will usually be given an initial software configuration with dedicated hosting, it may be up to you to do any updates or installation of additional software. You will probably need excellent Linux system administration skills, or will have to find somebody else who can do this.

Although you didn't mention it, I expect you to move to a Linux dedicated server. Look carefully at the distro you get. Many distro's (especially the Fedora Core distro's is my experience) have a very short lifetime. After the distro is finished there may be some months of support and updates, but if there is no commercial support, updates may die out pretty rapidly. Especially since February 9th 2007, because at that moment the Fedora Legacy project--supporting older Fedora Core distributions--was shutdown because of lack of interest, contributers and funding.

So if you can choose between different Linux flavors, select the more professional one (like RedHat Enterprise) to prevent yourself reinstalling the OS twice a year or not receiving critical updates if you decide to stay with your original distro.

So if you can choose between different Linux flavors, select the more professional one (like RedHat Enterprise) to prevent yourself reinstalling the OS twice a year or not receiving critical updates if you decide to stay with your original distro.

Good point. Fedora is, IMO, a poor choice for web hosting. I run FC6 at home for development/test.

If you want to stay in the same "family", go with either Redhat Enterprise (also referred to as "RHEL") or Centos. Centos is identical to Redhat Enterprise but is free. (In a bizarre twist on the licensing terms, Centos is now prohibited from mentioning that it has any relationship to Redhat Enterprise. Their documentation and website refers to Redhat as "the upstream vendor".)

Centos 5 has just been released, hot on the heals of RHEL 5.

So, you will not get cutting-edge features, but you will get stability and availability of security and bug patches for a long time.

If your site is large, investigate tar and gzip.

You create a tarball (compressed archive) of the entire site on the existing server.

From your dedi you use wget to get the tar file from the old server to your dedi. This uses the big bandwidth from the dedi to the old server to transfer the entire website as opposed to the tedious task of FTP'ing files to and fro. A matter of seconds as opposed to hours.

Once on the new server, decompress the tar into the domain directory - all the permissions should be intact. You'll just have to adjust file paths for any scripts and whatnot . . . you can move a large site in an hour or two.

If you have a mysql database, investigate mysqldump. mysqldump creates a script file that will reconstruct the entire database in a matter of seconds by logging in to mysql and executing

source [scriptfile]

I didn't ( and still don't) know anything about server management, so I went with a host that fully manages the server, just as they do in a shared or reseller enviroment.

The only thing that has changed going from reseller to dedicated for me is the monthly bill. The only reason I went to a dedicated is the host said I was using too many resources and others were complaining about the server being slow.

Most dedicated plans have a web interface that makes most of the managing academic. With a "managed solution" you most often give up root access - this is really a big deal as there are soooo many things you can learn to do with a command line access to your server. The above transfer methods are just one example. You're better off pairing up with someone who can show you the ropes for a while, this is a big investment and it's worth your effort to know what's going on. Even if you don't you won't be dissappointed with a managed solution.