How to Transfer Your Website to InMotion or Another Host

There may come a time when you need to move to another web hosting company to have them host your website. At one time, transferring your site to another host could be a big hassle and very time consuming. However, with the competition among web hosts these days, some of these companies are more than willing to do most of the work for you to get your business.

Even if you have to perform most of the transfer yourself, the process isn’t as complicated as you might think. As an example, let’s assume you’d like to move your site from your current host to InMotion Hosting (a good choice). Here’s how you go about it.

• First, if your current hosting company uses cPanel, the process is even easier.
• From your current host, login to cPanel and perform a full backup. If you need instructions on this task, see my previous post on how to perform a backup in cPanel.
• Download the backup file to your computer using FTP.
• Upload the cPanel backup to your InMotion Hosting server.
• Notify InMotion via email with a request to restore your backup.
• InMotion Hosting will notify you when the restore has been completed.
• If you have email with your domain, you’ll need to set up your email addresses and accounts through the InMotion cPanel.
• Remember to change your nameservers from your old host to InMotion. The nameservers for InMotion Hosting are usually ns.inmotionhosting.com and
  ns2.inmotionhosting.com.

Timing is critical when transferring your site from one host to another. Be sure to perform the transfer before your current hosting term ends and may be renewed automatically. You should notify your current host and inform them that you will not be renewing your account there. Depending on your situation, it may be better to perform the transfer first and then let your current host know that you’re not renewing. Also, you may want to test out your site at InMotion by using the temporary URL they give you or by editing the hosts file on your computer before you change your nameservers.

If your current web host does not use cPanel, you’ll need to download your files via FTP and use phpMyAdmin to export any databases that you have. You then need to use FTP and phpMyAdmin again to upload your files and databases to InMotion. You can find more detailed information on the InMotion website. And of course, you can use InMotion’s excellent customer support if you need further assistance.

If you’re moving your site on your own to a web host other than InMotion, the process will be very similar to the above steps.