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Moving from cp.pipeten.co.uk

This is a guide for moving away from our legacy hosting control panel (cp.pipeten.co.uk) to the purely.website hosting control panel. Here we will discuss the steps required to backup and move your website/application with minimal downtime to avoid any interruption to your services. This guide is Linux hosting account focused only and the steps/guides here will not work for Windows Hosting environments


Deciding what to move

Before you begin to migrate the website you should take a look at the account as a whole. Are there any old backups you don’t need? Old domain/sub domain folders? Removing these now can save time in backing up and moving things you don’t need to. See the spring cleaning guide for more details.

Cleaning up the account before moving

The easiest way to see all the content on your website is via FTP using an FTP client like Filezilla. We  recommend downloading any files you no longer need to your local machine and deleting them off the server.

Duplicating DNS records/What to keep

We recommend using the nameservers to point your website/email to the purely.website hosting service, this means any additional DNS records setup within the legacy hosting control panel will need duplicating across. The most common records you will need to move are any custom A records, pointing sub domains over, TXT records for google validation or similar & MX/SPF records if you are using an external email provider.

A guide for finding the DNS in the legacy control panel can be found here

To add these DNS records to your new purely.website control panel,

  1. Login to https://cp.purely.website/
  2. Under  the Websites header, click on the site you wish to add the DNS records to.
  3. Click Domains, click on your domain name, using the left menu click DNS records.
  4. Here you will see you new DNS records listed, to add a new one simply click the Add Record button, select the record type, the hostname. alias/value/IP/priority/weight/port/address and finally the the TTL. Click Create.

Backing up the website content

The simplest way to backup the websites content/files in the legacy hosting control panel is via FTP. We recommend using FileZilla for this purpose, keep an eye on any failed transfers and make sure you resume/retry these.

If you are using a website application such as WordPress, you can use plugins to help with the backing up of the site content/ Database.

Application specific tools

  • WordPress – UpdraftPlus is one of the most popular and easy to use.
  • Drupal – Backup and Migrate, Back up and restore your Drupal MySQL database, code, and files or migrate a site between environments.
  • Joomla- Akeeba Backup, Akeeba Backup creates a full backup of your site in a single archive.

Migrating the email

We have a custom built in house tool to help with the migration of mailboxes from one service to the other. https://imapsync.pipeten.co.uk/

Just make sure you’ve setup your new mailbox in the cp.purely.website control panel, enter your existing legacy email details in the first box and your new details in the other and click Submit. Its as simple as that!

Backing up the databases

To backup your MySQL database you would need to login to PhpMyAdmin using your MySQL user details. This information can be found within your websites database connection strings.

We have a full walkthrough for this here.

Restoring the website

Once you have a copy of your website on your local machine, restoring it to the Purely.Website service is much easier. There are a few ways to do this,

Zipping up the backup and uploading/extracting via the file manager

  1. On the machine you’ve used to take your FTP backup of the websites files, go into the folder, select all the files and create a .zip file.
  2. Within your cp.purely.website control panel, click Files, double click into the public_html folder, click the Upload button, click file, then find the .zip file from your local machine and click open.
  3. The file will begin to upload, showing you the progress at the bottom right of the screen.
  4. Once the backup has been uploaded, you will see the new zip file in the file manager, right click on this file and click Uncompress. Depending on the size of the backup, this may take a while to complete. If the above method isn’t working for you, you should try the FTP method below.

Using FTP

  1. First you will need to ensure your domain name is already using the purely.website nameservers (ns1.purely.website, ns2.purely.website, ns3.purely.website).
  2. While logged into your cp.purely.website control panel, click Advanced, FTP.
  3.  Click Add account. set your username e.g youruser@yourdomain.co.uk, a strong password, and if required access to a specific directory. By default this is / the root domain folder. Click Add.
  4. Now you’ve setup your FTP user, you can use the following details to connect via your FTP client;
    Host: ftp.yourdomain.co.uk
    Username: youruser@yourdomain.co.uk
    Password: Your chosen strong password

Restoring the database

First we must create our new database and associate user.

  1. While logged into your cp.purely.website control panel, click Databases, Add database.
  2. Create your new database name, this will start with part of your domain name as the prefix, enter the second part after the _ click Add.
  3. Once the database has been created, we will need to create and assign a user to it. Click on the newly created database. Click Database users, click Add.
  4. Enter your new username and strong password, generally leaving All database privileges ticked is recommended, leave other settings as the default and click Add.

Using the built in SQL upload function

Below your newly created Database user, you will see the Upload SQL header, you can click the upload button, navigate the the backup on your local machine and click open. The upload will begin, note the max upload size is 1gb, large databases can be tarred (.gz) to compress them to a much smaller size to allow a quicker upload/to fit within the 1gb limit.

Using PhpMyadmin to upload the SQL database

From the top of this page, you also have access to PhpMyAdmin, clicking the Open PhpMyAdmin link will automatically log you into your database using your database user. Your database can be imported using the import tab in the main menu

  1. Click on your database in the left menu.
  2. Click on Import using the main menu, under the heading File to Import, click choose your file and locate your local MySQL database backup, click open. scroll to the bottom of the page and click import.

Testing the website

Its important to make sure everything is working as it should be before updating the nameservers (DNS) to point the domain over to the new service. The best way to do this is to update the host file on your local machine. This allows you to browse the website as if the DNS was already updated. Note you may receive SSL related warnings until the DNS is updated, this is expected and the free SSL service makes use of the live DNS to issue the certificate.

Updating the nameservers

Once happy that all is working as it should be, and you haven’t done already, you will need to update the nameservers for the domain. If your domain is hosted with us (purely.website) then this is a simple selection in the nameservers section of the control panel.  If your domain is else where you will need to update the nameservers on the domain to,

  • ns1.purely.website
  • ns2.purely.website
  • ns3.purely.website

Closing the old account

After testing & DNS propagation if you no longer require the legacy hosting account, this will need closing. To do this please complete the following, https://www.pipeten.com/cancellation/

Tools/Guides to help with the migration process

Here are a few inhouse tools/ guides as well as some external tools to help with the migration process.

https://purely.tools – Our custom built inhouse tools to help with numerous testing, from DNS to SSL testing. A very helpful resource for checking/testing during any website migration or general debugging

https://imapsync.pipeten.co.uk – To help migrate emails between Pipe Ten services

Backing up your email/tasks and contacts in outlook

Backing up your email within Mac Mail

How to view/test your new website without updating the DNS

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