This guide will provide instructions on how to migrate your website from another hosting provider that utilizes cPanel to InMotion Hosting. InMotion Hosting offers Shared Hosting Plans that come with cPanel. If your previous hosting provider also uses cPanel, the process of migrating your website(s) can be accomplished effortlessly using a cPanel backup.

Evaluate Your cPanel Account

cPanel provides a Backup/Restore Plugin that enables users to restore an entire cPanel account using a backup file that was created within the same cPanel interface. A complete cPanel backup includes the user’s home directory (website files, emails, etc.), cPanel settings, and MySQL databases. It is important to consider the following limitations when assessing your website for migration through the cPanel backup/restore process.

Hosting Plan Limits

When assessing your cPanel account and websites, it is important to review your hosting plan’s features to ensure that the number of websites and databases included meets your requirements. You can always adjust your hosting plan up or down to add or remove websites later. However, for example, to restore a cPanel account with six (6) websites (which includes 1 Primary domain, 5 Add-on domains, and 6 MySQL databases), you would require a Power plan. If you have a Launch plan, you would need to upgrade your hosting plan to support the restored cPanel account.

Please note that InMotion Hosting Business Class Hosting plans are restricted to one (1) cPanel user. If you are hosting multiple websites, make sure that they all exist within a single cPanel account. If you require multiple cPanel accounts to host your websites, you can refer to the list below for available hosting plans that enable you to manage multiple accounts via cPanel’s Web Host Manager (WHM).

  • Reseller Hosting
  • VPS Hosting
  • Dedicated Server Hosting

cPanel Account Size

If your cPanel account size is less than 5GB, you can use the Backup/Restore functionality built into cPanel to migrate your website. Here are the steps to follow:

  1. Log in to your old hosting company’s cPanel account.
  2. Click on the Backup Wizard icon, located under the Files section.
  3. Click on the Backup button.
  4. Choose Full Backup and click on the Generate Backup button.
  5. Wait for the backup to complete. This may take several minutes, depending on the size of your account.
  6. Download the backup file to your local computer.
  7. Log in to your InMotion Hosting cPanel account.
  8. Click on the Backup Wizard icon, located under the Files section.
  9. Click on the Restore button.
  10. Choose the file you downloaded in Step 6 and click on the Upload button.
  11. Wait for the restore to complete. This may take several minutes, depending on the size of your account.
  12. Once the restore is complete, you will see a message indicating that the restore was successful.

That’s it! Your website has now been migrated to InMotion Hosting.

Generate cPanel Backup

To create a backup of your cPanel, you can refer to our guide “Backup Your cPanel” for step-by-step instructions.

It’s essential to log in to your previous host’s cPanel to generate the backup required for transferring your website(s).

Once you have created the backup on your old host’s cPanel, move to the next section to download it to your computer.

Download cPanel Backup

Once you have successfully generated a cPanel backup from your previous host’s server, you can download the backup file to your desktop by utilizing FTP.

After downloading the backup file to your computer, you can move on to the next section to upload the cPanel backup 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 successfully uploaded your cPanel backup, you can submit a Website Transfer Request from your Account Management Panel (AMP).

To do this, fill out the Website Transfer Request form and include the following 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 the backup file
  • Comprehensive list of databases expected to be restored from the backup file

When requesting a cPanel Account Restore, please keep the following in mind:

  • Customers can request assistance with restoring free cPanel backups from a previous hosting provider as-is.
  • The Website Transfer Service does not guarantee the removal of hack content.
  • The Website Transfer process does not include the transfer of Domain Registrations or email accounts.
  • Emails associated with a cPanel account backup are restored as-is.

WARNING: Restoring a cPanel account from a cPanel backup file will overwrite the existing user’s cPanel data, including website files, emails, databases, and more. Any data that has been saved in the existing cPanel user’s account on your InMotion Hosting server will be deleted and replaced with the data contained in the cPanel backup file. However, the existing cPanel account’s username assigned by InMotion Hosting will remain the same.

Test Your site

After our Website Transfer Team notifies you that the restoration has been completed, it’s essential to test your website(s) to ensure that everything is functioning correctly.

If you haven’t yet pointed your domain to our name servers, you can test your website 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.

Author

Kamran

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