Moving your website to Ruachost (free migration)

Ruachost moves your website to us for free. Our team copies your files, databases and email accounts from your old host, so you don’t have to rebuild anything.

The quickest way

Order your hosting plan, then open a support ticket asking for a free migration. We’ll take it from there.

Before you start

• Keep your old hosting active until your site is working on Ruachost. Don’t cancel it until you’ve checked everything.
• Use an email address that isn’t on the domain you’re moving (for example, a Gmail address) for your Ruachost account. Your domain’s email may be unavailable for a short time during the move.
• Allow a few days of overlap between the two hosting accounts.

Request a free migration

1. Order a Ruachost hosting plan if you haven’t already.
2. Log in to the client area and go to Support → Open Ticket.
3. Choose the Support department.
4. Tell us:
   • the domain(s) you want to move
   • which Ruachost plan they should go to
   • the name of your current host
   • login details for your old hosting control panel (cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin or similar). If you can’t share a control panel login, FTP and database access also work.
   • anything we should know, such as email accounts to move or a preferred time
5. Submit the ticket.

We’ll reply when the copy is ready so you can check your site before going live.

Note

If your old host uses cPanel, we can usually move everything in one go, including email accounts and their messages. See what’s included in a cPanel migration. From other control panels, we copy your files and databases, and we’ll tell you if anything needs your input.

Check your site before going live

Your domain still points to your old host until you change it. To view the copy on Ruachost first, edit your computer’s hosts file to point your domain at your Ruachost server IP address, or ask us for a temporary preview link.

Go live

When you’re happy with the copy:

1. Change your domain’s nameservers to nsa.ruachost.com and nsb.ruachost.com. See How to change domain nameservers.
2. Wait for the change to spread. This usually takes a few hours and can take up to 24–48 hours.
3. Check that your website and email work.
4. Cancel your old hosting.

Prefer to move it yourself?

You can also move your site manually:

1. Files: download everything in public_html from your old host, then upload it to public_html on Ruachost with File Manager or FTP.
2. Databases: export each database from your old host with phpMyAdmin, create a new database and user on Ruachost, then import the file. See Importing and exporting a MySQL database.
3. Settings: update your site’s configuration file (for WordPress, wp-config.php) with the new database details.
4. Email: create your email accounts again on Ruachost.
5. Change your nameservers as described above.

Moving a WordPress site? See How to migrate an existing WordPress site to Ruachost.