Every hosting plan here that runs on cPanel includes a free cPanel to cPanel migration: web hosting, WordPress hosting, business hosting and the economy range. If the site you are moving is on cPanel somewhere else, you do not have to move it yourself.
What the migration covers
A cPanel account is a single thing. A migration between two cPanel servers moves the account rather than its parts: the files under the home directory, the databases and their users, the mailboxes with their contents, the mail forwarders and filters, the cron jobs, the DNS zone as it stands on the old server, and the account's own settings.
It does not move what was never in cPanel. A domain name is registered somewhere and is a separate job; so is anything living outside the account, and so is a licence tied to the old server's address.
What we need from you
- The hostname or IP address of the server the account is on now.
- The cPanel username and password for that account, or an account-level backup you have already generated.
- The domain or domains involved, and which one is the account's main domain.
- Anything unusual about the site: a custom PHP version, an application that stores the old server path, a cron job that must keep running on a schedule.
Send those on a ticket in the Technical Support department after you have ordered, with the service it relates to attached. Never put a password in a ticket until we have asked you where to put it.
The order that keeps the site up
- Order the plan and let it be set up. Your account is created and your login details are on its page.
- Open the ticket with the details above. We copy the account across while the old one carries on serving the site.
- Check the copy before anything points at it. A hosts file entry on your own computer makes the new account answer for your domain without changing anything for anyone else.
- Lower the TTL on your DNS records a day before the switch if you can, then change the nameservers or the A record. Traffic moves over as caches expire.
- Leave the old account running for a few days. Mail that arrives there while DNS settles is mail you would otherwise lose, and an old account is cheap insurance.
Two things worth knowing in advance
Mail is the part that bites. Once the domain's mail is pointed here, anything delivered to the old server stays there. Copy the mailboxes last, as close to the switch as you can, or accept that a few messages will need fetching afterwards.
A migration is a copy, not a move. Nothing is deleted from the old host by us. Cancelling the old account, once you are certain the new one is serving everything, is yours to do and worth doing deliberately rather than early.
If the old host is not cPanel
The free migration is cPanel to cPanel, because that is the case where an account can be lifted whole. Moving from Plesk, from a panel of somebody's own, or from a plain server is a different piece of work: open a ticket with what you have and we will tell you what is involved before you commit to anything.