mikedee - 11:23 am on Apr 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

Actually upgrading is normally very easy, but only if you have access to the machine. If you do...

- Make sure your /home is on a different partition to / (I normally put all my website and sql data into /home)
- Backup
- Install new operating system (make sure you do not format /home)
- Restore anything not in /home
- You should be up and running

Quite often hosting companies reimage the server so you will have to backup /home to another server.

If you can suffer a few hours of downtime then it is easy, otherwise you will have to move the site to another box whilst you work on the main one.

Distros like Ubuntu claim to be able to update a live system, I have had limited success with this though. A deb based distro is better than an rpm based one, Gentoo is by far the most reliable to upgrade major versions but that is not on servers very often.