How to Migrate Your Website Using cPanel

This article will assist you with migrating your website from another hosting company that uses cPanel to InMotion Hosting. InMotion Hosting offers Shared Hosting Plans, featuring cPanel. If your previous hosting company uses cPanel, then migrating your website(s) can be done easily, using a cPanel backup.

Evaluate Your cPanel Account

cPanel includes an excellent Backup/Restore Plugin that will restore an entire cPanel account from a backup file, created within the same cPanel interface. A full cPanel backup will include the user’s home directory (website files, emails, etc), cPanel settings, and MySQL Databases. Consider the following limits when evaluating your website for migration through the cPanel backup/restore process.

Hosting Plan Limits

While evaluating your cPanel account and websites, be sure to review your hosting plan features to ensure the number of websites and databases included meets your needs. You can always up/downgrade your hosting plan to accommodate adding or removing websites later. However, for example, in order to restore a cPanel account with six (6) websites (6 websites = 1 Primary domain + 5 Add-on domains + 6 MySQL databases) a Power plan would be required. If you purchased a Launch plan, in this case, you would need to upgrade your hosting plan, in order to support the restored cPanel account.

NOTE: InMotion Hosting Business Class Hosting and cPanel WordPress plans are limited to one (1) cPanel user. If you host multiple websites, be sure that they all exist in one cPanel account. If you require multiple cPanel accounts to host your websites, the following hosting plans allow you to maintain multiple accounts, via cPanel’s Web Host Manager (WHM): Reseller Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Server Hosting.

cPanel Account Size

Only cPanel accounts that are less than 5GB in total size may be migrated using the Backup/Restore functionality built into cPanel. When evaluating your website(s) for migration, you will need to check the total size of your cPanel account. You can find your cPanel account size by logging into cPanel and locating “Disk Space Usage” under the Stats section.

Click on the button below that represents the size of your cPanel account (at your old host), to expand additional details on how to proceed with migrating your website.

<5GB Accounts

5GB+ Accounts

Generate cPanel Backup

To generate a cPanel backup, follow the steps in our tutorial: Backup Your cPanel.

Then, proceed to the next section to download the old host’s cPanel backup you just created from your old host to your computer.

Download cPanel Backup

After you have generated your cPanel backup from your old host’s server, download the backup file to your desktop using FTP.

Then, proceed to the next section to upload the cPanel backup you just downloaded from your computer to your InMotion Hosting Account.

Upload cPanel Backup

Now, using FTP, upload the cPanel backup file (you just created and downloaded) to your InMotion Hosting server.

Request cPanel Account Restore

Once you have uploaded your cPanel Backup, submit a Website Transfer Request from your Account Management Panel (AMP).

Simply, fill out the Website Transfer Request form and include these details in the Additional information to help us locate your data section.

• Authorization to overwrite the existing cPanel account, with the restored cPanel account. (See warning below)
• Location of your cPanel backup file
• Name of your cPanel backup file
• Comprehensive list of websites expected to be restored from backup file.
• Comprehensive list of databases expected to be restored from backup file.

Test Your site

Once our Website Transfer Team notifies you that the restoration has been completed, you may test your website(s) to make sure everything is working properly. If you have not yet pointed your domain to our name servers, you can test your site through either your Temporary URL or by making a hosts file modification.

Update Name Servers

The final step in the process of migrating your website(s) from another host using cPanel to InMotion Hosting, is to update the name servers for your domain(s) to point to InMotion Hosting.

Once you have updated the name servers with the registrar of your domain, it can take anywhere from 4-24 hours for these changes to propagate.

Congratulations! You now know how to migrate your website(s) using the cPanel Backup/Restore process to move your website from another host (that uses cPanel) to InMotion Hosting.

Learn more about server management from Managed VPS Hosting Product Guide.