Migrations: Moving to KapsuleHost
How to move an existing website, mailbox or domain to KapsuleHost, what the self-serve wizard does for you, and where the paid managed service fits.
Everything starts at Migrations in the KPanel sidebar, which opens /migrate. From there you choose what you are moving, and each type takes a different route.
What You Can Move
The picker offers three things.
A website. A self-serve, automated migration. You either install a small connector plugin on your existing site, or give us read access to it, and the platform copies the files and the database across for you. When your domain's mail is hosted somewhere else, the wizard adds an email step so your mailboxes can come across in the same move.
Email and mailboxes. A self-serve migration that copies mail out of your current provider over IMAP and into a KapsuleHost mailbox, mailbox by mailbox and folder by folder. See Email Migration.
A domain name. This is not really a migration, it is a registrar transfer, so the picker sends you to the domain transfer flow. See Transferring a Domain In and EPP Auth Codes.
Free Self-Serve, and Paid Pro Services
There are two separate things with similar names, and it is worth being exact.
The migration wizard in KPanel is free. There is no charge for running it, on any plan. Website migrations and email migrations both go through it, and nothing in that flow adds anything to your cart. Inside the website wizard there is also a "have our team do it" option, which opens a support ticket rather than an order, so that is free too.
Pro Services are a separate, optional, paid product. Under Store, the Pro Services catalogue sells one-off engagements delivered by our team with a stated turnaround, including Website Migration at US$150.00, Email Migration at US$120.00 and DNS Migration Assistance at US$60.00. These are one-time charges, shown excluding GST.
Start with the free wizard. Most moves complete without anyone touching them. Buy a Pro Service when you want the whole job scheduled and run for you end to end, or when support has looked at your setup and recommended it. If you are not sure which you need, open a ticket and ask before you buy anything.
Migrating a Website
The wizard is at Migrations, then the website option. It runs in five steps, plus an email step when your domain's mail is hosted somewhere else.
Step 1: Your Current Site Address
Enter the URL of the site as it exists today. The wizard looks at it and detects what it is running. Hosted platforms such as Shopify, Squarespace and Wix do not provide the full-site export the wizard needs to move a site automatically, so when it detects one it will tell you it cannot continue automatically. Those need a rebuild, or a manual export of the data each platform does allow, not a migration.
Step 2: Choose How We Get In
Three paths, and the first is the one to prefer.
The connector plugin (recommended). You download a small plugin from the wizard, install it on your existing WordPress site, and paste in the one-time token the wizard shows you. The plugin packages your files and database and uploads them. Nothing on your old host needs to accept an incoming connection, which is why this path works through firewalls and restrictive hosts that the credentials path cannot.
Credentials. You supply FTP, SFTP or SSH details, and for WordPress sites the database details as well. You can also point at an existing SQL dump file instead. Use this when you cannot install a plugin.
Have our team do it. Fill in what you know and submit. This opens a support ticket and a person picks it up.
Treat any credentials you enter as compromised once the migration is done, and change them. That is good practice for any host handover, not a comment about KapsuleHost.
If Your Domain Has Email Elsewhere
When the wizard finds your domain's mail at another provider, it adds a Your email step. Choose to move it and enter each mailbox's login, and your mailboxes are copied across alongside the website. Your mail keeps arriving at your old provider until you point your MX records at KapsuleHost, which is a separate step you take once the copy has finished. If you skip it, the go-live screen offers Move my email too afterwards.
Step 3: Connect
For the plugin path, the wizard waits for the plugin to check in and shows you when it has connected. The token is single-use and time-limited. If it expires before you get to it, generate a fresh one from the wizard and paste the new one in.
Step 4: The Assessment
Before anything runs, the wizard assesses what it found and shows you an estimated duration, a confidence level, and any risks it has spotted. Read the risks. They are the things most likely to need your attention afterwards.
Step 5: Launch
The migration runs and you land on a live progress page that walks through connecting, scanning, pulling files, importing the database, rewriting URLs, provisioning and verifying.
Your Live Site Is Not Touched
This is the part people worry about, so it is worth stating clearly.
A migration does not overwrite your existing site, and it does not change your DNS. The copy lands on a temporary KapsuleHost address so you can open it, click around, and check it before anything public changes. Your current site keeps serving your visitors the whole time.
Going live is a separate, deliberate step: you change your DNS to point at KapsuleHost when you are satisfied. The progress page tracks that too, showing whether it is waiting on the nameserver change, propagating, or live. See Nameservers and Adding and Connecting Your Domain.
Changing Your Mind After Going Live
You have a 7-day rollback window. Your old site stays exactly as it was at your old host, because a migration never changes it, and for seven days after your site goes live, going back starts with one click on the migration's page.
Open the migration from Migrations and use Go back to your previous host on its page.
- If your domain is registered with us, or it uses our nameservers, one click sets back the change made when you went live. Before it changes anything, it checks that your old host still answers for your domain, and it shows you exactly what will change.
- If your DNS provider supports one-click changes, the click takes you to your provider to approve the change back.
- If your DNS is somewhere we cannot change, it shows the exact records to change at your DNS host, then checks public DNS for you and tells you plainly whether going back is in effect yet.
Keep your old hosting for at least seven days after going live. Once it is cancelled, there is no old site to go back to.
If going back moves your nameservers, your email moves with them: new mail goes wherever your old DNS sends it, and mail that already arrived at KapsuleHost stays in your KapsuleHost mailboxes, where you can still read it. Your copy on KapsuleHost stays as it is, so you can go live again later without migrating again. Kora can do the same for you: ask it to take your migration back.
After the Move
Work through this list before you consider the migration finished:
- Click the real pages. The homepage, an inner page, a form, and the checkout if you have one.
- Check the certificate. It is issued once DNS resolves to us. See SSL Certificates.
- Look for mixed content. Very common after a domain or protocol change. See Fixing Mixed Content.
- Check permalinks. KapsuleHost web hosting runs nginx, so
.htaccessrules from your old host do nothing here. See Permalink Issues and WordPress and .htaccess. - Confirm your PHP version. See Changing PHP Version.
- Recreate your cron jobs. They do not come across. See Cron Jobs.
- Check your email. The website copy itself does not carry mail. Your mailboxes come across only if you chose the email step in the wizard, or Move my email too on the go-live screen, and new mail reaches KapsuleHost only once your MX records point here. See Email Migration.
- Take a fresh backup now that the site is where you want it. See Taking a Backup.
Tracking a Migration
The Migrations page lists everything in flight and everything finished, across all three types. Click any row for its own detail page: a live progress view for a website migration, a per-mailbox progress view for an email migration, and a timeline for anything a person is handling.
If a migration fails, the page says at which stage. The most common causes are credentials that do not work, a source host blocking the connection, and a database that is too large to pull in one pass. Support can see the same job you can, so quoting the tracking ID in a ticket saves a round trip. See Opening a Support Ticket.