Having a site with flawless hosting is very important. But what if you want to end your site? There is more behind setting down a website or service than most people think. Did you think about what happens with your data when the service stops? And what about the backups? If one is not cautious a lot of data can remain behind. Luckily, Firelay has a standardized process to make sure we get rid of everything.

Reasons to end a service

So why does a customer wants to end a service anyway? Although there are many different kinds of reasons, the commonly known reasons are:

  • All contact with the customer is lost;
  • A customer wants their application to be migrated to another hosting party;
  • The application is rebuilt using an unsupported technology.

Grace period

Whatever the reason is, our aim is to always clean things up nicely. However, our process starts with exactly doing the opposite: we do not remove anything! When someone indicates that an application or server is no longer needed, we only shut it down. After that, we wait at least 1 week, just to make sure the customer does not make up his mind. Only if they are absolutely sure the application or service will be removed safely.

We wait a certain amount of time because we experience that customers do not know that an application is still being used. Similarly, they often do not know that the new application is about to replace the old one which is not ready yet. And finally, there are also the customers who just have a change of heart.

After the initial grace period, we create a full backup of the application and its environments. This backup contains all the data, applications, dependencies and databases. The backup is retained for another month (extra grace period), after which it is removed completely.

Remove all references

After that we remove the servers from all operational systems and services:

  • Nagios – no more notification of potentially failing services anymore;
  • Netstat – no need for traffic statistics anymore;
  • Backup schedule – no need for additional backups;
  • Firewall – because we eventually want to re-use the IP-address at some point in time.

We use DNS (Domain Name System) to display our websites or applications on the web. Most of the time we leave the DNS record alone. This, because when we begin to make a new server we modify the name of the server and site. When there is a client who comes back after that period of time, we removed the server. So we use Poweradmin to modify DNS record changes easy and quickly.

Contacting details of our customers are kept in our CRM and configuration information about the servers in our Configuration Management Database. All user data and the application, however, are removed.

As almost all our servers are virtualized using XEN, removing the server is just a matter of typing ‘xm shutdown’ on the hypervisor. After executing this command the machine is switched off, and we will permanently delete the machine’s data on the hypervisor.

Communication is vital

During the full process, it is important to communicate with the customer (that is in all scenario’s except for the one where the customer disappeared 😉 ). Because migrating an application to another party is always a multi-step process, it is vital to keep in touch with the customers the progress on both sides.

The full process takes about half an hour, but in order to do this correctly, it will take about one and a half month. The most important thing here is to create backups of the server, for when a customer decides to stay. Next to that paying attention to detail and the use of a checklist in order to let everything run smoothly are great help. In my case, I find it interesting to optimize these processes and to see the whole procedure run as planned.

So as a tip from Firelay to you: at first just make things inaccessible, then, later on, remove it.