What access do you need to migrate my sites

Less than most people expect, and never your registrar password. What is needed depends entirely on what the old host gives you, and there is usually more than one route.

The easiest case: a cPanel host

If your current host runs cPanel, a full account backup carries everything: files, databases, email accounts and their stored mail, cron jobs, DNS records and account settings. Either you generate it and tell us where it is, or you give us the old cPanel login and we take it.

This is the cleanest route because nothing is reconstructed. What arrives is what you had.

When there is no cPanel

Then it is assembled from parts, and we need whatever gets us those parts:

• Files. FTP or SFTP credentials, or an archive you upload yourself.
• Databases. A dump, or database access to take one.
• Email. Mailbox credentials if stored mail has to come across, which is the part most often forgotten until it is missing.
• A list of what exists. Which domains, which subdomains, which of them actually still matter.

That last one is not access, but it is the thing that most affects whether the move goes cleanly.

What we do not need

• Your registrar login. Nameserver changes are yours to make, and they are the step that decides when traffic moves. Keeping that with you is deliberate.
• Payment details for the old host.
• Admin logins for the sites themselves, unless something has to be reconfigured after the move.

Handing over credentials sensibly

Send them through the client area rather than by email, and change them once the move is finished. If the old host supports it, create a temporary account for the migration and delete it afterwards rather than sharing the main login.

The same applies in reverse: if someone else is doing work on your estate, scope their access rather than sharing yours, along the lines set out in giving access without giving the account away.

If you would rather not hand over anything

You can do the move yourself and use us only for the parts that need our side: creating accounts, assigning addresses, and confirming the destination is right. Plenty of people migrate that way, particularly when the estate is small or the sites are simple.

Either way the sequence is the same, and it is worth reading building a migration timeline before starting so the order of operations is decided in advance.