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Migrating between ElfHosted datacenters

ElfHosted's default datacenter is located in the EU, which may not result in the best performance for users in other parts of the world.

We're expanding to other regions, and this guide will show you how to migrate your ElfHosted services between regions.

What you need to know

  1. Our hosting costs vary per-region. In order to maintain pricing parity across regions, resources may differ per-region (for example, the US cluster has lower CPU limits but higher bandwith allocations)
  2. Data migration is based on daily 24h offsite backups, so if you migrate 23h after your last backup, you'll loose the most recent 23h of changes. To make a manual backup, run elfbot backup offsite from ElfTerm.
  3. Your data persists on each individual cluster for 7 days. So if you migrate back to our default datacenter after 6 days, you'll "pick up where you left off" 6d ago, but if you migrate back after 8 days, you'll get your data restored as of the most recent daily backup. What you should know

There are some discrepancies between the datacenters which you should be aware of, listed below.

elfhosted.cc

Due to hardware differences, in this environment, users get 25% of RAM limits, and 50% of the CPU limits they'd get at elfhosted.com, but 200% of the bandwidth. To date, these limits have not impacted normal function of any of the apps of our power users / beta-testers.

Process

  1. (optionally) Force a manual backup, by running elfbot backup offsite from ElfTerm, and investigate any failures (if you care about that particular app's data)
  2. Use Kubernetes Dashboard to examine the contents of any elfbot-<app> ConfigMaps, and manually copy any custom ENV vars you want to migrate (ConfigMaps are not part of the backup you did above, they remain with the cluster)
  3. Use https://speed.elfhosted.com to identify your ideal datacenter
  4. Add the "Elf-spedition" subscription to your account, picking the appropriate datacenter
  5. Your apps will be turned off on the primary cluster, and created on the target cluster - this may take 10-15 minutes, depending on the volume of data restored from offsite backup
  6. Your apps will run from the new cluster, with a new domain suffix! (i.e., instead of https://batman.elfhosted.com, you might be https://batman.elfhosted.cc)
  7. Re-apply any custom ENV vars using ElfBot (you need to run elfbot env <app> at least once to create the ConfigMap in the new cluster)
  8. If you're using any custom domain names, update your CNAMEs to point to the new cluster suffix

FAQ

Can I un-migrate?

Yes, cancel your subscription within 7 days to roll back to the original datacenter, where your volumes persist for 7 days. If it’s been more than 7 days, your volumes will have been cleaned up, and you’ll either get the latest cloud backup, or a fresh installation.