InMotion Hosting Pre Website Transfer checklist

Website transfers are considered on a case-by-case basis depending on the size of your site, complexity of programming, and the platform/OS of your previous host. We will need the following information pertaining to your previous host in order to review your site and determine whether we will be able to move it for you, and as well as any costs involved. If you want to transfer your website on your own, you will want to read our articles on How to migrate your website FROM another host TO InMotion Hosting and Perform your own website transfer.

Please note! that while we take care to ensure that your site will be as fully operational as possible on our servers, we are unable to provide technical support for programming matters or in-depth configuration and dependencies of your site, or other issues that are not directly server-related. For websites over 5G in size, sufficient SSH access must be provided to your old server. Your site transfer may be subject to additional terms, such as pricing, time frame, and scope of configuration.

While we do try to complete all site moves in a timely manner, the volume of requests to transfer websites we recieve will directly impact the timeliness of the site moves. Please keep this in mind when submitting a website transfer request.

The following article will explain to you the general process for having your Website transferred by InMotion Hosting staff.

What to do before the transfer

Setting your website to Maintenance mode

Before you have your website transferred to InMotion Hosting, you will want to communicate to our tech support staff the best time to have your files and databases transferred. In some cases the transfer may take days. We understand you cannot have your site in maintenance mode for days, so, you will want to coordinate with tech support to make sure your data is not lost in the transfer. You will want to set your site to maintenance or under construction mode during the transfer process. The reason for setting your site to maintenance mode is to prevent data loss during the file transfer. While your website is in Maintenance Mode, no new content, database entries, shopping cart purchases and so forth will occur during the transfer.

Complete the Website Transfer Request Form

When you are ready, fill out the website transfer form and then your transfer process will begin.

When the Website Transfer is completed

Testing your site with a Hosts file mod

You can test your web pages using a hosts file modification on your computer, to make the DNS requests for domains go to a specified IP address. For information on performing a hosts file modification, please visit Modifying Your Hosts File. By using the Hosts file modification, you can fake your local computer to go to your website allowing you to see a live view without allowing acces to the site on the web.

Pointing your Nameservers

Once you see your website working on a hosts file modification, you can point your domain to InMotion Hosting nameservers. Below are our nameserver hostnames and IP addresses.

When you make changes to your DNS, Please allow up to 24 hours for propagation after making the change.

Speeding up your DNS propagation

To speed up DNS propagation, you can change the DNS A record for your domain (at the old host nameservers) to have the new IP address for your website here. The TTL (Time To Live) value on DNS A records is typically 14400 (4 hours), which is quicker than the TTL on nameserver records typically 86400 (1 day).