Retire a site from VIP

Notify the VIP team 30 days in advance of the desired retirement date of a WordPress or Node.js site or application from VIP by creating a VIP Support ticket. At the end of this period, VIP will typically retire the site(s) along with the non-production environment(s) and update the account’s billing details as per the agreement.

In the case of selective retirement of network sites within a WordPress multisite, customers can mark those sites as “Not launched” in the Network Sites panel in the VIP Dashboard to disable production monitoring for them.

A recent database backup and a media backup of the site—as well as a copy of the application’s wpcomvip GitHub repository—will be needed to archive or migrate a site or application to other hosting.

Media files and database

A full backup of media files and a backup of an environment’s database can be downloaded from the VIP Dashboard of an application. The media file archive will be supplied with the same directory structure as the file uploads. The data will be supplied as SQL from the mysqldump client.

GitHub repository

Reviewing the structure of the VIP codebase before migration is recommended.

If the GitHub repository will no longer be used by an active VIP site, the associated GitHub repository will be removed once the site(s) has been retired. Ensure that a local copy of the site’s repository is saved.

A copy of the code in a VIP repository can be downloaded by cloning a copy of the GitHub repository. This method retains the version history and all changes.