For those who have been through awkward migrations previously, the prospect of migrating to another server can be intimidating. Fortunately, for all cPanel-to-cPanel migrations (and for most others,) we will take care of all the hard work for you!
For non-cPanel migrations, unless another arrangement has been made, there may be a $25/hour migration charge. For a same-day migration, there is a $75 urgent migration fee, and for migrations with less than 48 hours' notice, there will be a $25 fee unless otherwise stated.
Black Chicken Host will migrate your cPanel account to our servers for free! Simply submit a migration request within 30 days of signing up for your new account and we'll handle the rest.
Preparing for Migration
As with so many things in life, migrations are easier the more time we have to prepare and execute them. For non-emergency migrations, there are several things you can do to facilitate a smooth process. These include:
- We recommend signing up with Black Chicken Host using an email address that will not be affected by this migration, as during the migration itself, your email may be unavailable. Of the free email solutions out there, we like GMail a great deal here at Black Chicken Host, but any off-domain email will do.
- Lower your DNS Time to Live (TTL) values to 300 seconds. In many cases, we will be able to take care of this for you if you provide your registrar account login information. This is important to do at least 48 hours before the actual DNS changeover occurs. Lowering this value to 300 seconds ensures all networks across the internet will update their information as to where your website lives every 5 minutes. That means far less downtime due to DNS propagation! Unless you have access to your authoritative zone file, you may have to have your existing host or registrar take care of this for you.
- Let your readers and/or customers know of the upcoming migration, and that there will be some amount of downtime involved. This will ensure no surprises on their side.
- Remove all old backups and unneeded files from the remote account, and be sure to delete any emails you no longer need. Reducing the number of MB's or GB's needing to be moved will speed the process up significantly. If you have a WP backup plugin, such as Backup Buddy, please be sure to delete all old backups which you no longer need before the migration begins.
- Optional: If you are not planning to make any changes to your site prior to the migration, you can generate a full cPanel backup of your account on the remote host. This will save time, too. We recommend downloading a copy of this backup to your personal computer for archival purposes.
- Open a support ticket with Black Chicken Host and we'll send you our migration questionnaire.
The Migration Itself
Small accounts typically migrate very quickly and easily (usually, downtime will be less than 30 minutes,) provided the server environments are similar. Large or complicated sites may take more time and may involve more downtime. We will do our best to provide a reasonable estimate for the amount of time it will take to migrate, as well as for the amount of time we estimate the site will be down.
There are two processes we can accommodate in terms of testing your site after the migration:
Test the Site Yourself:
Once we have everything migrated and looking good from our perspective, we will ask you to verify all the data is present and accounted for on our servers, including email, images, databases, et cetera. If you'd like to approve the new site before your readers begin to come to it, we'll show you how to trick DNS on your local computer using a local hosts file so you can see the site as if it were live.
Once you have confirmed all is well, we recommend putting the old site into "maintenance mode" if possible, so no additional changes can be made. Then, we can do a final sync of the data if anything has changed since the initial import was done. We'll take care of this step for you with your permission.
When the final sync has completed and all is well, DNS will need to be changed at the authoritative source. Generally, this is accomplished by changing your nameservers at the registrar to ours (ns1.blackchickenhost.com, ns2.blackchickenhost.com, ns3.blackchickenhost.com, ns4.blackchickenhost.com) If you're using custom nameservers, the zone file there will need to be updated to point to your new IP address, which we will supply in our response to you after the migration is completed. We can typically take care of this for you if we have your registrar login information.
We Do the Testing for You:
In most cases, our customers would like their migrations to be done later in the night to avoid interrupting as many readers as possible. We typically perform these migrations after midnight, Eastern time, which can be too late for people to stay up for. In these cases, we ask for a list of pages to test, and we will compare the version on our servers to the version on your old server. If we see anything seriously awry, we will leave DNS pointed to your current host and let you know what issues we saw.
If everything passes the "sniff test" and appears to be working well, we will change DNS to our servers so your traffic begins coming here. If you see any issues when you next check the site, we will work with you to resolve them.
You know your site best - we may overlook a detail when we test for you; however, we will never leave your site in a state of chaos. We'll do our very best to ensure a smooth experience.
Potential Hiccups
Occasionally with migrations, a problem crops up. Often, this is an issue with a PHP function that was enabled (or disabled) on the old server which is in the opposite state on our servers. Usually, this can be mitigated with a custom php.ini file, which we can help you set up.
Other potential points of conflict are the versions of PHP, Perl, or MySQL, and installed Apache mods. In a shared server environment, we sadly cannot make global changes to the server, as it would compromise the stability of the system and would affect all users on that server. However, we can usually find a way around incompatibilities.
SSL certificates can also pose some trouble. Please let us know before the migration begins if you are using any SSL's, and if so, for what domain(s).
DNS Propagation (What is DNS Propagation?)
Provided the DNS TTL's were lowered as in step two above, the entirety of the internet will be able to access your website on our servers within five minutes or less. However, if lowering the TTL's was not possible, propagation may take the full amount of time the TTL's are set for. This may be any value between 5 minutes (300 seconds) to 24 hours (86400 seconds.) A typical value is 4 hours (14400 seconds.)
Post-Migration
Once the migration has been confirmed a success, we can tidy up.
- Raise the TTL's back to 14400 seconds - we do this for you.
- Cancel the account at the old host - making sure you still have a backup available off their server! We recommend waiting a few days before cancelling your remote account, just in case - you must do this yourself.
- Relax and enjoy your websteading experience here at Black Chicken Host!
If you do not have a cPanel account and wish to migrate to Black Chicken Host
Due to the nature of non-cPanel-to-cPanel migrations, there is sometimes a fee associated with migrating a non-cPanel account to us. Whether a fee will be assessed is dependent upon the complexity and size of the account. We will give you a good faith estimate of what the fee is before any work begins. We can also give you some pointers if you would prefer to migrate the account yourself or with help from your developer or administrator. In most cases, migrations take 2 hours or less of active work - we do not charge for the time we spend waiting for your data to download from your old host.
The pre-migration steps above are still valid; DNS TTL's should be lowered, et cetera. We will also need all of the information required to log into the remote server, including hostname/IP address, username and password, SSH and FTP ports (if not standard,) PHP and MySQL version if known, whether a full backup of your account exists on the remote server and where it is, and any other relevant details you can think of.
We will do our best to migrate everything as quickly as possible, but due to the nature of non-cPanel migrations, they typically take more time and effort. If outside assistance from cPanel staff is required, that may increase the time required, as well. If work is expected to go above and beyond the fee assessed, or if a fee becomes required after an initial "free" assessment, we will let you know before proceeding. In very rare cases, a migration may not be possible, and in that case, your hosting fees can be fully refunded; however, the migration fee will still be assessed for time worked - any unused portion of the fee will be refunded.
If you want to do the migration yourself, you can use tools such as FTP, SCP and rsync to move your data to our servers. This can be a very complicated process, however, and we do not recommend attempting this unless you have a firm grasp of Linux systems administration, Apache, and MySQL.
We are always happy to answer any questions you might have. Please submit a support ticket should you have questions or concerns not addressed by this article.
Resources
For your convenience and information, here are some migration-related links:
http://blogaude.com/moving-a-wordpress-blog-using-cpanel/ (free eBook - Moving A WordPress Blog Using cPanel)
