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.

Email and mailboxes. A self-serve migration that copies mail out of your current provider over IMAP and into a Kapsule 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.

The Migrations page in KPanel

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.

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. Closed platforms that do not allow an export of this kind, such as Shopify, Squarespace and Wix, are detected and the wizard will tell you it cannot continue automatically. Those need a rebuild or a manual export, 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 Kapsule.

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 Kapsule 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 Kapsule 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.

A pre-migration snapshot is kept and there is a rollback window of 7 days after the migration completes. After that, use your ordinary backups instead. See Restoring From a Backup.

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. Kapsule web hosting runs nginx, so .htaccess rules 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 email separately. A website migration does not move mail. 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.