Migration

Nowadays, a server operating system might host some of the following services: Web service and associated applications used by websites Mail service Database services DNS service Often there’s also an installed control panel software that helps to facilitate the deployment and management of these services. So migration of the data and services from one server to another one is, in this case, the process of transfer of the hosting control panel data and content (such as websites, mail, databases, DNS zones) to the new server. Disadvantages of Manual Backup/Restore Generally, the migration procedure backs up some data on the old server. Then, transfers the backup file to the new server and restores it there. For such a complex environment, the transfer of data to another server isn’t the easiest option. You can, of course, move all the data piece by piece using the native backup/restore tools for each server component and file copy. However, it often takes an unreasonable amount of work-time and manual operations. The other disadvantage is that it’s not possible to make a seamless transition if the services on the old server are active. Some data will be lost in transfer staying on the old server or some services will be down during the transfer. Migration to a Server with Plesk Let’s now suppose you have Plesk Obsidian on the new server. In this case, it will be easier to transfer all the data (web/mail/databases/DNS/Control Panel data). Because Plesk provides a special tool, the Plesk Migrator Extension, which automates the process. This is the migration tool that Plesk provides for migration to the latest, recommended Plesk Obsidian versions. You install it via Plesk Panel like any other Plesk Extension and it has a handy user interface too. There can be different reasons for migrating services and/or data from one server to another. Let’s go through the typical server migration scenarios and see how Plesk makes the whole process simple. Moving your services to the Cloud with Plesk and our hyperscaler partners Migration from another control panel/hosting environment to Plesk Migration to the new Plesk and Operating System versions Moving Your Services to the Cloud with Plesk It’s become popular to move onto cloud services and scale your business. You can easily install Plesk on the most-loved cloud platforms, like: Amazon AWS Microsoft Azure DigitalOcean Vultr Google Compute Engine (we have yet not blogged about this yet, but you can install Plesk on a Google Cloud VM the same way as a regular stand-alone Plesk server) And once you install Plesk, you can migrate to the cloud instance with Plesk from anywhere, in a standard way. There will practically be no difference as it doesnt depend on where Plesk is installed (cloud instance, virtual container/ machine or a physical server). You always migrate to Plesk using the Plesk Migrator Extension (this is the number one tool for Plesk migration). Migration From Another Hosting Panel/Hosting Environment to Plesk If you have any control panel you would like to leave for Plesk – check out our list of supported hosting panels. Specific versions of Plesk for Windows and Linux: 8.6, 9.5, 10.4, 11.0, 11.5, 12.0, 12.5, 17.0, 17.5, 17.8. cPanel 11.5 Helm 3.2 Confixx 3.3 Parallels Pro Control Panel for Linux 10.3.6 Plesk Expand 2.3.2 DirectAdmin 1.51 (just custom migration is supported when you switch from DirectAdmin installed on Ubuntu 10.x) These objects, settings, and data will be transferred during migration: Plesk Migrator moves the following: service plans, websites featuring content (e.g. mail, files), and subscriptions with related domains for your convenience. In the case of customer and reseller accounts without domains, these won’t be migrated. Additionally, Plesk service settings will not be transferred. These include Fail2Ban settings, firewall configurations, and installed PHP handlers. How to Install Plesk Migrator You can complete Plesk Migrator’s installation via Plesk’s interface. Here’s how: Log in to Plesk as the administrator, on the destination server Navigate to Tools & Settings, go to Updates & Upgrades, then Add/Remove Components Hit Install beside the Plesk Migrator component Prefer to process the Plesk Migrator’s installation with a command line instead? In Linux, you can sign in to the destination server through SSH as the root user, or in Windows through RDP as the administrator user Follow these steps: On Linux, run this command: plesk installer On Windows, go to the command prompt and run "%plesk_bin%\ai.exe" --console. Continue with the installation wizard, and follow the directions provided until you’re invited to choose components Pick the “Plesk Migrator” component to be installed and run through the rest of the procedure, following the instructions as they appear on-screen What if none of the supported hosting platforms are installed on the source server? You can migrate from a server running an unsupported hosting platform (or none at all) with custom migration. With custom migration, you’ll create a hosting description file written in JSON or YAML and detail the objects to be migrated (such as mailboxes, domains, etc.). You can perform custom migration even if you lack administrative access to the source server. How to Migrate from a Linux Server with Custom Hosting This topic covers migration to a Linux server running a control panel that isn’t one of the supported source platforms, or one with hosting but without a control panel. These scenarios are supported: Migrating from a server with custom hosting (with administrative access): This situation requires you to create a hosting description file including a list of subscriptions, clients, mailboxes, etc. and defines where mail and web content data can be found on the source server. The file’s format is readable by humans and covers the majority of popular hosting services. It could be in JSON or YAML. Migrating from a server with custom hosting (without administrative access): In this scenario, it’s presumed that you’ll manually transfer database dumps and web content data from the destination server to the source one. You’ll need to make a hosting description file, but it will specify where database dumps and web content data will be located on the destination server. Please be aware that you can only use the command line to migrate from servers with custom hosting,

How to Transfer WHM Backup to Remote Destination Through FTP? The backups are an inevitable part of the websites/Servers. Consider the situation if you have accidentally deleted your website file/directory it may affect your whole website. If you have a valid backup you can simply restore the website from backup so the website backup is the most important thing to protect your server against data loss. cPanel/WHM offers to create server backup in the WHM. You can configure backups daily, weekly and monthly in WHM. Please refer following KB to configure backup in WHM. WHM Backup Configuration Explained Some cases you don’t have sufficient space in your server. In this case, you can transfer the configured backup to the remote server. In this tutorial, we will discuss how to transfer the configured backup to a remote server on WHM. Working Once you have configured all things, the system will generate first cPanel account backup and transferred this back up to the remote server once the transfer has been completed system will generate next account backup and transferred to remote server. Configure the FTP destination. 1) Login to WHM as a root user. 2) Go to Home >> Backup >> Backup Configuration. 3) Go to Additional Destination >> FTP from Destination type 4) Click the button “Create New Destination”. 5) Then you will get new window likes below screenshots and enter following details of the remote server. 6) Once you enter all required details click on the button ” Save and Validate Destination”. 7) Then click “Save Configuration” once the validation has been successfully completed. 8) Now you can check the transferring is working or not by running the backup manually. Run below command to run the backup manually. /usr/local/cpanel/bin/backup  –force From there you will get a new log file and you can check the backup and transfer process from that log file.

Migrate Email Accounts from Zoho to cPanel If you have IMAP in Zoho account, we can migrate emails via IMAP copy. To do this we need following details. IMAP server name(Zoho). Zoho username and Zoho user account password. new cPanel email address and password. We have noticed that Zoho does not provide IMAP for some accounts. In this case, we can import email via webmail. For this, first needs to take backup of the Zoho accounts. 1) Log in to the control panel as an admin user 2) Then select ” Export Mail Accounts” under Mail Administration. 3)Select the option “Entire Account” and click the button “Begin Export”. 4)Each account’s download backup link will create once the export process is completed. From there, you can download email backups of each account. Import Emails to a new email account. 1) Login to cPanel >> Emails >> Email Accounts. 2) Go to “Access Webmail”. 3) Select ” Round cube”. 4) Then click “Import Message”. 5) Then select the backup file which exported from Zoho. Now the email accounts are successfully migrated to your cPanel account

Virtualmin can import the accounts from cPanel by taking the complete cPanel backup file including all mailboxes, databases, contents,.. etc. This kind of migration process is much faster than others but need a special attention because some of the features of Webmin is not enabled automatically when you migrate the site. The site will work after migration but need to enable special features that only specified by the Webmin with care and testing. To copy or transfer all the services from cPanel to Virtualmin, first of all we need to take the fresh backup of them. We can generate the full cPanel backup by using the following steps:   1) Login to cPanel–> Backup –> Download a Full Account Backup. Then you can create an ftp account or you can change the permission of backup to download on the server. 2) You can now download the generated backup file to your Virtualmin server via FTP or wget option. For this, login to your Webmin server via back-end access, then try to download the backups in a screen using ftp or wget option. If your backup is larger than a few megabytes, you can copy the file using a reliable transfer mechanism, like SCP. All Linux systems have scp built in, and so can easily be used to copy the file to your new Virtualmin server. 3) Once you downloaded the backup file from source server to destination server, now you can proceed with the restoration process. The restoration process on Webmin/Virtualmin some what different from the other migration like cPanel to cPanel and cPanel to Webuzo cross migrations. NOTE: Before migrating emails from cPanel to Webmin , verify if both the servers has compatible email formats? The destination server email format should match with the cPanel mail format. You can verify it by checking any of the “Maildir” directory of the email account. We can now discuss about the remaining migration process on Webmin/Virtualmin. 1) Login to your Virtualmin Dashboard. 2) Click on the option “Add servers” shown in the left side panel. 3) Then click on the “Migrate Virtual Server” option. 4) Select Source Backup File : If you upload the backup to the virtual server via any of the option we already specified like FTP or wget, then you can select the option “Local file or directory”. If you download the backup to the local PC then select “Upload to server” option. 5) Select a ‘Backup File Type’ of cPanel. 6) Select Domain name to migrate and Fill in Username for domain by switching from “Work out from backup, if possible”. And it must be any valid username , but for ease of use, you may wish to use the same name used under cPanel. 7) Choose a Password for administrator. 8) The remaining options can be left to their defaults. 9) Finally, click on the button ‘Migrate Now’.

Are you worried about the recent cPanel price hike? Are you looking for a new control panel which is free and have almost all features of cPanel? Then you should take a look at CentOS Web Panel. ( CWP in short. ) CentOS Web Panel is suitable for the following category of customers.1) Customers who don’t need server reselling option. But a full-featured panel to manage the server.2) Customers whos looking for a powerful, secure, open-source, and free control panel. If you are already on a cPanel server and want to know to migrate your websites to CentOS Web Panel, then keep reading. As mentioned previously, the CentOS Web Panel is an excellent free alternative for cPanel. It has almost all similar features inbuilt. We can easily integrate it with Cloud Linux and LightSpeed for better security and performance. It also provides Nginx- Apache reverse proxy and even provides a well-defined proxy set up with Nginx-Apache-Varnish for enhanced performance. CWP also has different panels for the administrator and standard user with different level of access. That is similar to cPanel and also the interface.The CentOS Web Panel comes with a cPanel migration tool which is also well built. That means the migration is not that hard as you think. We can do it with a few clicks. Please keep reading. Important Notes: – Do not create the account for the cPanel user in CentOS Web Panel. That will cause issues with the migration. So, let’s start. Here in this article, we will go through the steps to import a cPanel account to the CentOS Web Panel with all its contents and email accounts. 1) Create the cPanel account backup by following the first three steps 2) Download the backup directly to the server using rsync or scp if you are good with the Linux shell. If not, download it to your local PC. Then upload or move the backup to the server and place it under the /home folder. There is another easy method also. But you’ll need command-line knowledge. If the domain still pointing to the old cPanel account, then place the backup under the site’s document root. ( Mostly public_html ). Then login to the CWP server and execute the following command. cd /home/; wget http://domain.com/backup.tar.gz 3) Now login to the CentOS Web Panel admin interface. Then click on “cPanel Migration” option under the “User Accounts” tab. 4) If you correctly placed the backup file under /home, then it’ll show under “Account Import” tab. Select the backup that you uploaded then choose the desired package under “Associate Package” tab. Also, make sure to enter a secure password for your account.Now select the what domain data you want to restore. Check all boxes if you want a full restore. Then enter a temporary email password for your email accounts. When you are ready, click on the “Import” button. 5) That’s it! Now all you need to do is wait, and the migration tool will do the rest. The interface will show you the progress of the restoration. Once it’s all done, you will see a migration completed message on the screen. You have completed the migration. Now we need to test the working of websites. For this, you can temporarily point the domain to the new server’s IP by editing the “hosts” file. After doing that, your domain will load from the new server. If you don’t know how to point the domain to new IP using “hosts” file. Do the tests and if all good, then update the DNS for the domain name to point to the new server IP address to get it online.

If you are one of our VPS or Dedicated customer, then you probably already know about the Webuzo/Breadbasket control panel. If you haven’t, then it is a free control panel that we are offering with our server products. It’s an alternative for cPanel, Plesk or other paid control panels. Yes, you will get almost all the features of those control panels with Webuzo, and you don’t have to pay anything! This tutorial is for customers with an existing cPanel server ( with us or external ) and planning to migrate the accounts to one of our Webuzo servers. Please keep reading, and we’ll show you how to do it. Webuzo is easy to use control panel with a lot of inbuilt features to make your server management more effortless. It has tools like one-click application installer, and with that, you can install applications like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal and many other applications with a simple click. No system admin level knowledge is required to do any of these tasks. It’s very user-friendly, secure, and powerful at the same time. If you want to know more about Webuzo and the features. There you can see the full list of applications, tools and all other details about Webuzo. So, I hope you have done your research and ready to move your cPanel accounts to Webuzo. Let’s start the Webuzo migration then. Important Notes: 1) The server must be a freshly installed one. Webuzo username and cPanel username must be same for the account that we are trying to migrate. 2) This utility will overwrite all the current user data. 3) Put the full backup of the cPanel account under /home/username/ folder. 4) This tool will migrate your domains, databases, and other data. But it won’t import the email accounts. If you want to migrate the email accounts, then you will need to do it using email migration tools such as “imapsync” or “IMAPcopy.” Please follow the tutorial given below. ( After completing the migration. ) cPanel to Webuzo Migration: 1) Create the cPanel account backup by following the first three steps as shown in this tutorial. 2) Login to the Webuzo control panel, add click on “Import From cPanel” icon under the “Server Utilities” tab. 3) Here in this step, there are two ways to import a cPanel backup. First is “Remote Import” and second is “Local Import.” Let’s check and discuss both options, and you can choose how you want to proceed. Remote Import: Fill out the form with the cPanel server hostname or IP address, username, and password and then hit the “Submit” button and that’ll start the process. ( This is the easy method but will take bit more time than the “Local Import.” You should choose this if you don’t want to spend time uploading backup to other server and other steps. ) Local Import: In this case, upload the backup to the server under -/home/username/ folder first. ( You can use FTP, scp, rsysnc on any method that you prefer. ) Then fill out the form with cPanel hostname or IP address, username. Enter the backup name when the system asks you, “Do you have a backup saved on the local server?”. Hit the “Submit” button, and that’ll start the import. That is all! Now you wait, and you will receive an email upon completion of the import process. If any issues with the import process or if you want to monitor the process, then the log file is available under: /usr/local/webuzo/includes/cli/cpanel_migration.log. You have completed the migration. Now we need to test the working of websites. For this, you can temporarily point the domain to the new server’s IP by editing the “hosts” file. After doing that, your domain will load from the new server. If you don’t know how to point the domain to new IP using “hosts” file Do the tests and if all good, then update the DNS for the domain name to point to the new server IP address to get it online. I hope you now understand how easy is cPanel to Webuzo migration. That is the end of this tutorial. We hope that this article helped you migrate cPanel accounts to Webuzo control panel.

cPanel is one of the most common and widely used control panels. But cPanel has recently announced a massive increase in their pricing scheme. This increase in the price schema has impacted so many customers and businesses. So, customers are now migrating their cPanel sites to other control panels, and some of them are migrating their cPanel sites to DirectAdmin. DirectAdmin provides three levels of access, such as admin, user, and reseller, and is a web hosting control panel. DirectAdmin also offers both graphical and web-based interfaces. You can control an unlimited number of websites and email accounts using a DirectAdmin panel. The DirectAdmin panel does not provide all the features as same as that of cPanel, but it does provide equal user satisfaction as that of cPanel.  You can purchase the DirectAdmin license from the YiSolutions. DirectAdmin offers many administrator features, such as DNS Administration, IP Manager, Create/Modify Admins and Resellers, Mail Queue Administration, and more. To install the DirectAdmin control panel on your server, follow the steps and tips on the tutorial topic “DirectAdmin Installation”. In this tutorial, you learn the steps to migrate your website accounts from cPanel to DirectAdmin. Please note that you should have a DirectAdmin version 1.57.3 or higher to migrate the cPanel accounts to DirectAdmin. Migrate Accounts from cPanel to DirectAdmin To migrate the cPanel accounts to DirectAdmin, follow the below steps: First, log in to your cPanel account as a root user via SSH. Then, run the following script to generate a full cPanel account password. Please note that the generated backup should be in the ‘cpmove-user.tar.gz’ format. The /scripts/pkgacct script packages all the accounts in a cPanel. Replace the <username> flag with the username of the cPanel account. # /scripts/pkgacct <username> /home/user_backups; After generating a backup, Log in to the DirectAdmin server as a root user. Run the following command to sync the cPanel backup to the DirectAdmin server. # rsync -avt /home/user_backups/ root@<your_directadmin_server>.com:/home/admin/converted_user_backup/ Check the DirectAdmin version by running the following command. # /usr/local/directadmin/directadmin c | grep -i 'version=' Go to the ‘custombuild’ directory by running the following command. # cd /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild Next, update the build script by using the following command. # ./build update Then, install the cpanel_to_da plugin using the build script. # ./build cpanel_to_da Change the user and group ownership of the user backup file to admin by running the following command. # chown -R admin. /home/admin/converted_user_backup If your cPanel account username has a name length more than 8, then run the following command to increase the name length on the DirectAdmin server also by running the following command. In the following command, the value ‘16’ represents that the name length should set to 16 on the DirectAdmin server. # /usr/local/directadmin/directadmin set max_username_length 16 restart Now, log in to the DirectAdmin front-end by hitting the following URL in any of the browsers. https://<Server_IP_Address>:2222 or https://<Server_domain_name>:2222 Go to the ‘Admin Tools’ tab and select the ‘Admin Backup/Transfer’ option, as shown in the following screenshot. You get redirected to the Admin Backups page, and from there to restore the backup in your server, click the ‘RESTORE’ button. Next, change the path in the ‘Restore Backup’ page from undefined to the path of the backup in the server (/home/admin/converted_user_backup). Then only the backup gets displayed, and after that, click the ‘NEXT STEP’ button. Replace the IP address with the server IP and click the ‘NEXT STEP’ button. In the Next Step, you can select the cPanel backup that needs to get restored from the list of cPanel backups. Select the files that need to be restored and click the ‘RESTORE’ button. Now, the backup restoration gets initiated. This process of backup restoration gets added to the queue. After the restoration completes, it displays a message with the subject ‘Your User files have been restored’ in the ‘My messages’ page. Fix Common Migration Related Errors. After the migration completes, some customers may face some issues due to migration. Some of the common migration-related errors are: Version Compatibility Issue Incorrect Permission and Ownership To fix these common migration-related issues, do the following: 1) VERSION COMPATIBILITY ISSUE: To smoothly migrate the accounts, the version of all the software running in both source and destination server should match. If there is any software version compatibility, then the website or account won’t work as the same as that of the source server. For example, sometimes, a user can get a blank page for their website after the migration. In this case, the chance is that the PHP version of the destination is not compatible with the website content, or there is a mismatch in the extensions or software version. So, we can check the version of the software or extension in the source server and replace the destination software or extension version as same as that of the source server. This process can fix the version compatibility issue after the migration. 2) INCORRECT PERMISSION AND OWNERSHIP After the migration, the website may throw some error due to incorrect permissions and ownership of the files/directories in the destination. So, after migrating the site, we should make sure that the files and directory permission are 644 and 755, respectively. During the migration, we change the ownership of all the files to admin, but even after the migration, if there is any mismatch, then we can change the files or directory ownership to fix that error.