One of the most frustrating thing someone can do involving their websites is moving them from one hosting provider to another. It’s increasingly more difficult if your hosting was based on a control panel such as Cpanel, and try to migrate to a different kind of control panel or none at all.

Step One – Package your account

If you have root access to the server via SSH (such as if you have a VPS) you can do this quite simply by performing the following command.

/scripts/pkgacct username

The above command will place the cpmove-username.tar.gz file into the /home directory where you can download it via FTP/SCP.

For those who only have user-level cpanel access, you will need to log into your cpanel account. From there under the file section you will see a Backup Wizard icon.

When you click on that, you’ll be prompted to 1) Backup. 2) Full Backup 3) Provide email.

When the backup packaging is complete you will receive an email notification, and the generated file will be placed in your home directory. (usually the default root of your FTP client when you log in). You will want to download this .tar.gz file onto your desktop.

Step Two – Preparing to upload

For those of you who are windows users, you will need to download something such as 7-Zip in order to unpack the tar.gz file. Create a folder to place the file in and unpack it. The resulting files will be all the data from your Cpanel account (including your mail in MailDir format). Find the homedir.tar and pull it out of the folder and extract it.

Once extracted you’ll see various folders that was in your home directory. In /tmp you may even find some of your statistics such as webalizer which can be opened right from your desktop. The files you want to concentrare are in /public_html.

If you use any add-on domains, move them from the public_html folder. Once you’ve done that you can then compress the public_html folder content as a .zip file. Do the same for each one of the add-on domains. Don’t delete the uncompressed copies just yet.