Moving Your Website to Linuxweb Print

What migration actually involves

Moving to a new host sounds daunting, and left to chance it can be. Done properly it is routine, and mostly invisible to your visitors. The key is understanding that a move has separate parts that travel differently, and getting each one right in the right order.

Three things move, and they are not the same job:

• Your domain, the registration itself, covered in our article on transferring a domain. Your domain does not have to move for your hosting to move, the two are independent decisions.
• Your website, its files and its database.
• Your email, your mailboxes and the mail in them, which is the part with the important catch, below.

Our migration service

We offer a website migration as a fixed, once-off service: we move your site's files and database from your old host to ours, set them up, and check the site works before it goes live. It is offered during the order process and can be added afterwards through a support ticket. The current fee is on the relevant product page, this article does not quote a price because a live figure belongs where it stays current.

You can also do the move yourself, downloading your files and database from the old host and uploading them to us, using FTP and the tools in cPanel, as our articles on FTP and getting your first website live describe. Whether you hand it to us or do it yourself comes down to time and confidence: the service buys certainty and saves you the fiddly parts, doing it yourself costs nothing but your effort. Both are legitimate.

The email catch, and it is a big one

This is the single most important thing to understand before you move, because it is where people lose mail they cannot get back.

• If your old host runs cPanel, we can move your entire hosting account across, the website, the databases, and your mailboxes with all their existing mail, as one complete transfer. This is the clean, whole move, and it is why we always ask what your current host runs.
• If your old host does not run cPanel, we can move your website's files and database, but your email cannot be transferred. Mailboxes are created fresh on our side, and the old mail stays behind on the old server. Before you cancel the old service, you must download or back up any mail you want to keep, because once that old account is deleted, the mail is gone beyond anyone's reach.

So the first question we will ask about a move is what your current host uses, because the answer decides whether your mail comes with the site or needs rescuing first.

The order that keeps a move seamless

A move goes wrong mainly when the steps happen in the wrong order. The safe sequence:

1. Set the new hosting up with us first, and get your site moved onto it and working, tested using the server's IP address while your domain still points at the old host, as our FTP article explains.
2. Sort your email, the full cPanel-to-cPanel move, or creating mailboxes and rescuing old mail if it is not.
3. Only then point the domain at us, the nameserver or DNS change covered in our nameservers article, so the switch happens when everything is already in place and waiting.
4. Keep the old hosting active until you are certain everything works here, then cancel it. Cancelling the old service is always the last step of a move, never the first, and doing it early is how a planned migration becomes an emergency.

Good to know

Because the site is set up and tested on our servers before the domain is pointed across, a well-run migration has little or no downtime, your visitors keep reaching the old site until the moment the new one is ready, then simply start reaching the new one. The transition is designed to be invisible. If you would like us to handle the whole thing so it is done right the first time, get in touch, and tell us what your current host runs, it is the detail that shapes everything else about your move.