Migration Policy effective 1 January 2023
A recent audit of our support staff tasks has indicated that a disproportionate amount of time has been spent by staff doing migrations that are manual and more complex in nature. It is no longer feasible to continue to offer such migrations free of cost to clients. By manual we simply mean migrations where we cannot use automated scripts to assist us with the task in hand. Some examples of the types of tasks that are manual in nature are listed in the bullet points below:
Our charges effective from 1 January 2023 are listed below. Please note this supercedes our previous policy dated 7 November 2018.
New Clients (Shared Hosting, Business Hosting and Managed Servers) - Free
For Lite Plan Shared Hosting, one free Migration (cPanel or not) is included for all new clients moving into us or for every new service ordered from us if you are an existing client. There is a time limit of 60 minutes on technician time for this migration. If we feel a migration is going to take more than 1 hour then we will contact the client and advise them of the fee.
For Business Plans, Pro Plans, Managed Servers and Dedicated Servers we will allocate additional 'free' migration time in hourly increments in proportion to the cost of your service and the team can advise how many hours will be included with your new plan on request. This will allow us to move in more than one website free of cost for you subject to the overall time limit of migration time applicable to your plan. If you need more migration time we charge a very modest fee of £25 + VAT per hour to simply cover staff time to help new clients move into us.
cPanel to cPanel Migrations (with root access / transfer tool access) - Free
Where you ask us to do a migration from another cPanel server to your server with us, the migration will always be free assuming we can use automated tools to complete the transfers with generally very few problems.
cPanel to cPanel Migrations (without root access / without transfer tool access) - Chargeable
Where you ask us to do a migration from another cPanel server to your server with us and we cannot use the automated cPanel tools to faciliiate the migration then we will treat this as a manual migration (see below).
Manual Migrations - Chargeable
If you ask us to move a website from a server that is not using cPanel, we cannot use pre-built tools to do this for you. This means we have to manually migrate the entire site by first transferring the website files over to us, then dumping any databases from the source server before recreating them and restoring them with us. Once this is done, we usually have to do a host of other tweaks to get the website to work in a different environment than it’s used to (sometimes changing your files, like htaccess values and such). In this case, there is a modest £15 + VAT one-off charge for this service to help cover the technical time required. Where the migration is taking an excessive amount of time we will reach out to the client to advise them of the additional cost but in the vast majority of migrations the modest £15 + VAT fee covers things. If you have multiple websites to move in we should be able to offer a package cost for the entire migrations for you that will be cheaper than multiple single migrations - just ask the team.
WordPress Duplicator Migrations - Chargeable
Where you have your WordPress website residing on another host we can use plugins such as Duplicator Pro to assist with the data migration. An increasing number of clients are also asking us to ‘migrate’ their new WordPress websites for them before launching. E.g. ‘Please can you convert domain.com/devsite to load from a separate cPanel account as domain.com’. There will be a modest £10 + VAT charge to cover the staff time to perform this move for you. Please note there are many WordPress plugins such as Duplicator and WPClone and WordPress Toolkit in cPanel (among others) that can easily be used to implement this change yourself if you want to avoid the charge. Where a website is really large and we need to spend more time on the migration (rare occasion) we may charge more but will always communicate this to the client in advance and get permission.
Email Migrations - Chargeable
Where you need to move email into us we can do that using a process called ‘imapsync’. There are tutorials online that would help you do this, but if you need us to perform this for you, we charge a small fee of £5+VAT per email address with discounts available for more than 5 addresses to cover staff time.
We understand we may have facilitated some free migrations for clients in the past, but please see our very modest charges in the context of four very well known competitors we just called who charge £150, £60, £25 and £10 respectively for migrating a single WordPress website from a server not using the cPanel software and none of which offer IMAP Sync Email Migrations.
