Switching Hosting Providers

In order to move your site from your current hosting provider, you need to: Open an account with us. Once the account is opened, you will receive a welcome email message. It will contain the necessary login and name server information. Upload your site's content on our server. You also need to create all mailboxes you need through the online Control Panel. There is more information on moving your email service from another provider to us in this article. If your website uses server-side scripting, you should note that the languages we support on our servers are Perl, PHP, Python, TCL and Ruby. We also support MySQL databases. If your site uses MySQL, you would need to import the database content into your account and configure your software to connect to it with the settings on our end.If your previous host utilizes cPanel, you may transfer your data by importing a cPanel archive. Check this section of our Online Manual for details:cPanel Test your website on our servers and verify that everything is working correctly. You can do this by updating your hosts file and deleting the cache of your browser and local DNS. You can find step-by-step instructions on how to perform these actions in our "Using your local hosts file", "Clearing browser cache", and "Clearing local DNS cache" articles. Point your domain name to your account with us after you have verified that everything is working properly. This can be done by updating its name servers with the ones included in the welcome email message. You can change the name servers of your domain at your domain name registrar (the company through which you have registered the domain name). After you switch the name servers, you should allow up to 24 hours for the DNS propagation to take place.

There are several options available to move your files from your current provider: Upload your web site files using some FTP program To use this option, you will need to have some FTP program (CuteFTP, SmartFTP, Filezilla, Fetch for MAC, Transmit, WS_FTP, CyberDuck for MAC, etc) installed on your computer. If you have some HTML editing program with built-in publishing features (such as DreamWeaver or Adobe GoLive), you can use it as well.To move your web site files to our server, you need to: Download your web site files from your old hosting provider to your local computer. (In case you already have a copy of your web site files on your local computer, you can skip this step) Once you have the files downloaded, you need to upload them from your computer to your hosting account on our server. The FTP connection details can be found in your hosting account Welcome email. If your web site consists of many files, it will be much easier and faster to upload an archive of the web site and extract it via your Control Panel's File Manager section.If you need instructions on how to configure a particular FTP program, you may wish to check the following category in our online documentation - Uploading files.The main folder where your web site files should be uploaded on our server is /www/www When you have all your web site files uploaded to the server, you can test if the site is working fine online. In case your domain name is still pointed at your old web hosting provider, you can use the temporary URL listed in your account's Welcome email to test the site. It should look something like http://username.your_server.com, where username is your account username and your_server.com is the name of the hosting server where your account is located. If your site is database driven, you may need to alter some system paths, database connection settings, import your database to our server, etc. Use the FTP Migration Manager available in your hosting Control Panel In case you do not have an FTP program or you wish a server-to-server transfer of files, you can use the FTP Migration Manager available in your web hosting account Control Panel. It gives you an option to download your site files from your old hosting provider server to ours without the hassle to download the files to your local computer first.To use the FTP Migration Manager you need to: Log into your hosting Control Panel at our server, enter the FTP Migration section, and specify your old hosting account FTP details (as remote host you need to use the IP address of your old hosting server) and start the transfer. (see FTP Migration Manager) Once the transfer is completed, you can test if the site is working fine online. If your domain name is still pointed at your old web hosting provider, you can use the temporary URL listed in your account's Welcome email to test the site. In case your site is based on server-side scripting, you may need to alter some system paths, database connection settings, import your database to our server, etc. Use the cPanel importer available in the hosting Control Panel If you are moving a site from a service that runs cPanel, you may download a cPanel archive of your data and import it on our end by using the cPanel subsection of the hosting Control Panel > Migration section.

If the email service for your domain is hosted with another provider and you want to move it to us, there are several things that should be done in advance in order to ensure a smooth transition without downtime. Setting up mailboxes on your new account First, you have to create all mailboxes you want to use on your new hosting account with us. This can be done on the Mail Manager page of the Control Panel. Email won't be delivered to these mailboxes just yet, but they will be ready to accept new messages once your domain starts pointing to our servers. Pointing email to our servers After this is done, you have to tell the DNS configuration of your domain that email should be delivered to our servers. The easiest way to do this is to point your domain name to our name servers. They are listed at the top of the DNS Manager page of your Control Panel: If you want to host your email on our servers, but keep the DNS configuration of your domain elsewhere, you are going to have to set up the necessary DNS records for your email service manually. There is more information about this in the DNS records for email delivery article. Once the DNS changes propagate globally, your email will start being delivered to your mailboxes on our servers. Import messages from your previous email host This is a good time to copy the contents of your previous mailboxes to our servers as well. There are a couple of ways to do that. If your previous host uses cPanel, you can import the contents of all mailboxes automatically using the Migration -> cPanel page of the Control Panel. Another option is to use the Migration -> Copy mailbox page of the Control Panel to copy the contents of each mailbox over to your new account with us. This way, you can copy messages from IMAP mailboxes, as well as Gmail, Outlook (also Hotmail and Live mail), and Yahoo mailboxes. Finally, if you can obtain an archive of your mailboxes in Maildir format from your previous host, our 24/7 support team can import the archive on our servers for you. We can also import email from Google Takeout archives.

After you sign up for a hosting account, you will receive a welcome email message at the email address(es) provided during the registration. This message will contain the nameserver addresses that you should point your domain name to, along with other important information regarding your new hosting account.

After you update the nameservers of a domain name, the DNS updates need time to get propagated over the Internet. The DNS propagation depends on many factors; usually, the changes get propagated at most locations within minutes, but it may take up to 24 - 48 hours for the updates to take place at some networks. In the meantime, some visitors may reach your site at its old service provider, and some e-mail messages may end up at your mailboxes there.