SharePoint 2010 Site relocation
A project I have recently worked on involved moving an Internet facing hosted SharePoint 2010 site from one hosting provider to another.
The actual moving of the site was quite straight forward but did involve quite a lot prep work, the broad steps are covered below.
The site was made up of custom components deployed as WSP’s, a content-db backup and some farm configuration tasks.
To build the new platform we started with a vanilla SharePoint 2010 build, created an empty web application, restored the supplied content-db to the SQL server and ran a test upgrade check against the database
Test-SPContentDatabase –Name SP_Test_Content –WebApplication http://TestApp
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607941(v=office.14).aspx
We used the output of this to cross check which features the content database was expecting to find in the farm, these were added with powershell cmdlet
Add-SPSolution <wsp name>
The Test-SPContentDatabase cmdlet was run again to ensure nothing had been missed.
Once the site was running extensive testing was performed to identify any missing components or settings, most were identified as missing at the Farm level, such as content sources and search scopes
One of the issued noticed was accessing the site via an iPhone browser was redirecting to the mobile version, this was easily resolved by updating the browser definition file compat.browser file in the location
C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\<site folder>\App_Browsers
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff393836(v=office.14).aspx
The section
<!– iPhone Safari Browser –>
has the value
<capability name="isMobileDevice" value="false" /> set to
<capability name="isMobileDevice" value="true" />
This has to be replicated on all web-servers in the farm
Once testing has finished the Internet facing site was set to anonymous authentication and the site was extended to another zone with Windows authentication to allow authoring to take place.
I hope these broad steps help someone else faced with this task.
SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans 
When taking on a project like this it’s necessary to plan ahead. In some cases not all of the content is still relevant and it can be left behind.
Hi Sean,
You are quite correct the approach taken for any project like this would depend on the requirements set out at the project startup phase.
In this instance the requirement was to move the site in a “like for like” manner so this was the approach taken.
If the requirement was different we could have looked at moving sites or site collections via PowerShell or use of the 3rd party migration tools available to pick out areas of content based on some criteria or set of criterias.