Moving your site here
Most people stay with a host they dislike because moving looks like work. It is work. Ours.
What it costs
Nothing. On all three plans, on the monthly term as well as the three year one, and it stays free when the site turns out to be older and stranger than you said.
There is no setup fee behind it either. Send the credentials and say when it suits you.
What moves
| Files | all of them, permissions and symlinks kept |
|---|---|
| Databases | MySQL and MariaDB, large dumps included |
| Mailboxes | IMAP sync, folders and read state survive |
| DNS | records copied one to one |
| Certificate | a new one is issued before the switch, not after |
| Cron | jobs and their schedule |
| PHP | version and the settings you had |
The sequence
- You send FTP or SSH access and the database credentials for the current host. A backup archive works too.
- We stand the site up here on a temporary address and go through it. Your live site keeps running, untouched.
- You look at it and tell us what is wrong.
- We agree a slot, drop the DNS TTL a day ahead, resync everything that changed in the meantime and switch the records.
- Leave the old hosting paid for a few more days. Whatever turns out to be missing, we fetch it from there.
How long the site is down
For an ordinary site, not at all. Both copies answer during the switch and visitors land on whichever one their resolver knows about.
A shop taking orders is the exception. Two systems accepting orders at once means two order number sequences, so we agree a short window at night, usually a few minutes, and nothing falls between them.
When we say no
If the site needs something shared hosting does not have, moving it here only postpones the problem. A background worker running for hours, a database with its own my.cnf, a queue daemon, a service that expects root: those stay broken after the move, so we say no before we start.
The other case is access. If nobody can find the FTP password, the old host has been gone for a month and the only copy is a three year old zip, we can rebuild it, but call that a rescue, not a migration, and expect a phase where the site is not live.
Write first, with the URL and what runs on it, and you will get a straight answer the same day: support@r2d2hosting.com