How To Move Your Websites & Domains To Sites-host?

It’s very common for us to handle customers migrating their businesses over to Site-host on a daily basis.

We’re always very pleased to hear new customers have entrusted us with their web hosting and it’s not a responsibility we take lightly.

We understand how critical web hosting is to any business, therefore we try to do everything in our power to ensure a smooth and seamless migration process.

With all of this said, there are a couple of points I would like to highlight that may help some future (and current) customers.

Review Our Account Limits

At Sites-host we believe in being very transparent about our account limits. With that said, one of the most common “missed” limits in our Inode or file limit:

Limits Per cPanel Account

• Disk Space: Allocate from master plan
• Bandwidth: Allocate from master plan
• Virtual Memory: 2048MB (2GB)
• Physical Memory: 1024MB (1GB)
• Concurrent Connections: 25
• Number of Processes: 100
• I/O Limit: 2048KB/s
• I/O operations per second: 1024
• Inodes (soft/hard): 100,000 / 250,000 (Basic Business 250,00 / 500,000)

For those not familiar with what an Inode is, it’s basically a file, meaning you cannot have more than 100,000 files in an individual cPanel account (or 250,000 for our Basic Business package).

If you reach the “soft” limit, you will see the warnings come up in your cPanel. If you reach the “hard” limit, many features of the account (such as receiving email) will stop.

We’re not trying to be jerks with limits like this, instead it’s crucial to our server configuration to maintain the speed, reliability, and redundancy that we’re known for. Accounts that use this many files, should look at upgrading to a VPS Hostingpackage.

Most of the time we see this when someone has thousands of emails they’ve allowed stack up (i.e. not emptying their Spam box) or trying to host a website that’s too large for shared hosting.

Our support techs are more-than-happy to provide a “breakdown” of what directories are using up your limits. Prior to migrating over to us, you should check with your current web host to see how many Inodes your account is using. Most of the larger brands display this inside of cPanel.

Migrating Data

By far the most common request we see in our support desk is customers wanting us to migrate their data over from their previous web host.

We’re happy to provide 10 free cPanel to cPanel migrations (meaning your current host has cPanel) under a couple of conditions:

• We must be able to obtain a full cPanel backup from your current web host
• The size of the backup must not exceed 1GB in size

Some web hosts disable the “full account backup” feature to preserve the I/O on their hard disks. However, most are happy to generate this for you and place in inside your /home directory, but you have to reach out to their support to do so.

In some cases, we have seen current web hosts “charge” for this, which I personally feel is a really bad practice. A customer should have full access to all of their data, especially after requesting it from support. It shouldn’t be held as some type of “ransom” to retain business.

If you have more than 10 cPanel accounts, we’re also happy to assist, but we must implement a charge because of the time involved. If we did not do this, out tech support team would spend all their time doing migrations and wouldn’t be able to respond as fast and provide the awesome support we’re known for.

If your current web host doesn’t have cPanel, we’re also happy to assist, but we also must implement our charge because it requires one of our Level III techs to manually go into your account, grab all your data and bring it over to our servers. Once again, we’re not trying to be jerks, but this can be very time consuming.

Hourly Rate

To assist with these “custom” jobs we’ve implemented a simple server admin rate of $75 per hour. The first hour for new customers is discounted to $35. Prior to performing any migration our sales team is more than happy to login, take a look, and provide you with an accurate quote and invoice accordingly before getting started. On average, we can perform 10 – 15 cPanel migrations per hour depending on their size.

Most non-cPanel migrations take 2 – 4 hours depending on the number of files and databases involved.

To get started with an account migration, simply submit a helpdesk ticket to technical support after signing up providing your current Web Host Manager or cPanel credentials. If you don’t have cPanel, please provide your control panel and/or FTP information.

Transferring Domains

We manage hundreds of thousands of domains here at Name Hero. When I started in 2015, I actually was only going to offer domain name registrations, but later decided to branch out. This is why you’ll notice we’ve spent a good deal of time developing our Instant Domain Search with rock bottom low prices and our own Whois sites-host Privacy protection.

It’s also much easier to manage all of your hosting and domains in one place, as I have research that proves nearly a 500% increase in support resolution issues with everything inside our platform.

To transfer your domain to us you need to have a couple of items taken care of first:

• Disable the registrar lock at your current domain registrar
• Disable the privacy protection at your current domain registrar
• Obtain your EPP code (if applicable) from your current domain registrar

Most all large web hosting and domain management brands have all of these features available inside of their interface. If not, simply reach out to their support to obtain them.

Once you have complete all three of these items, you’ll need to order a transfer through our platform. You will need the EPP code prior to submitting your payment.

When the payment has been completed, we will automatically send a transfer request email to the registrant contact email address on file. This is why it’s important to disable privacy protection as a lot of companies dump all this into a “catch all” non-monitored email address. The transfer process cannot begin until you click the verification link inside the email.

Once the verification email has been clicked, domains are normally transferred in within 2 – 4 business days.

Free Domains

The majority of our Shared  packages come with a free domain registration or transfer for one year (if paying annually or longer). If that’s the case, you can use this when you first sign-up or save it for a later date.

Simply submit a ticket to our billing team if you choose to add it later so they can manually apply it to your account.