Web Site Transfer

These are steps you need to take in order to make sure your website is transferred without interruption.

Make sure your have enough time on your old host. Dont start the transfer the last few days.

We will provide enough time on the remaining days on the previous host for free Transfer to eSG.

DNS Changes can take 72 hours or even more to propagate on many ISPs, during that time your site will be down for their customers if the old host has removed your site.

Don't change your DNS records immediately, if you transferred the domain to us we will make the change in the proper time, if we are not your registrar our system will notify you when its safe.

You can directly access and work on your site in our systems the moment it is transferred even if the DNS is not up to date.

Timetable

The transfer process can take between 15 minutes and a few days, it all depends on your current setup. If you have access to your panel then it usually will take between 15-40 minutes for the site to transfer. For sites without a panel it depends on the actual page and how its made, if its a CMS (Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal) it will take up to a few hours, if its a static page a few minutes. Our support will provide an estimate upon receiving the credentials/data.

For DNS it depends on the registrar, the standard should be about 48 hours but due to the way ISPs update their zones it may take more than that. Please make sure you clear your dns cache in your router & system to make sure you see the change ASAP, you can find more information here: clear_dns

Requirements

Web Site Data

With a Panel

Credentials for your Panel

For cPanel we need the credentials you use to connect here:

https://domain.tld:2083 (substitute domain.tld with your domain)

For Plesk we need the credentials you use to connect here:

https://domain.tld:8443 (substitute domain.tld with your domain)

For other panels please contact our support eSG Support

Without a Panel

tar of all files

Request that your previous host or the site developer create an archive of all of your files.

dump of all databases

Request that your previous host or the site developer create an archive of all of your databases.

eMail Accounts

If you had a panel in your last host then your accounts would have been transferred and in most cases all your email too. Always check that this is a case, we provide you with access to your email accounts to our system even without DNS.

For hosts that do not use a panel or they use a panel that doesn't allow for the transfer you have two options:

Transfer all current email locally to one of your workstations and then transfer them back to our mail server.

Our mail servers should detect you are dumping old archives so they should allow you to make up to 300 connections simultaneously.

Our support can do the transfer for you, we will transfer all emails from the old server to the new one.

During the process your email will be unencrypted and technically our support is able to read it. In 90% of the cases our engineers will not have to look at the messages during the process but if errors occur we cant avoid it. You will be notified immediately.

Domain

For the transfer we will need the EPP Code, in most cases you should be able to get this from the previous host unless you registered it in another company.

EPP Code

Please note that the transfer of the domain is not necessary in case you want to keep your current registrar. In that case update your current zone with our DNS Servers: DNS

Google

Analytics Property

In many cases your previous host or site developer has created a property for your domain/site in Google Analytics. In order to keep all previous tracking and data you should transfer the property to one of your accounts and remove the old hosts permissions.

Transfer/Move of the Google Analytics Property

Google Documentation

My Business

Make sure you are the owner of your property, you can check access and remove 3rd party users from here: My Business Management

Common Questions

Time on previous host

It will make the transition a lot smoother, this way your site will always be visible even for visitors that have older DNS records cached or their ISP hasn't updated the zone yet.

Access to data

Unfortunately in many cases your data will be readable by our engineers during the transfer process. During this time your data has not yet been encrypted with your key and the web server reads it unencrypted. If you would like to avoid that we can arrange so that you do your own transfer but please note this is a technical task and if any errors occur we may have to charge your for time needed to resolve any issues that arise.

You can always encrypt your files directly as long as they are not needed for the function of the site. You can even dumb SQL tables and import them after the DB is installed as long as those tables are not needed for your site to function.