Mersh:

If you are wanting to do a full server changeover, here is how I would do it.

1. Send out an email to my users letting them know that I was changing servers and that during this process, they may experience a brief delay as everything changes over. Tell them that this is normal and that everything should be fully restored in about 24-72 hours.

2. Disable the ability for websites to make changes to their files.

3. Copy everything over to the new server.

4. Go to my registrar and make the changes to my name servers. Depending on who your registrar is, this can take anywhere from 1-72 hours.

5. After about 72 hours, perform a flush dns on your local machine

6. Ping your domains to see if they are pointing to the new or old IP address. Be sure to perform pings from multiple locations (find some online ping and nslookup services and check to make sure that your DNS has fully propagated.

7. Recopy all of your data from the old server to the new server to get any changes that could have been made (things do slip through the cracks).

8. Shut down the old server.

One thing to note, never name your servers with the same name as your name servers. Always use a name that is different, such as server1.server.com, etc.