How to Migrate from cPanel to ICDSoft's Control Panel

One of the hurdles new clients must overcome when moving their sites to ICDSoft is the lack of cPanel on our side. In this article, we will show how to move from a cPanel host to ICDSoft. In fact, you don't need to do anything yourself as our support team will happily move your cPanel site to our servers for free.

cPanel and WHM vs ICDSoft's Control Panel and Account Panel

cPanel is a server control software. WHM (Web Host Manager) gives additional administrative tools to control cPanel accounts. These software packages are often used by resellers, web designers, and web agencies on the VPS servers they operate for their clients. While these are powerful tools, their license fees increase the overall cost, especially after the recent pricing policy update of cPanel.

Both cPanel and ICDSoft’s Control Panel use the common concept of a hosting account package. There is a recent trend oriented towards "website packages" instead of hosting packages. While this does have some benefits, this move often comes with a drastic increase in price and removal of features. Usually, these “website-based” packages come in the form of a managed hosting service, which too often lacks essential hosting features like DNS, FTP, and email. Customers using "managed hosting" plans often have to pay to a third-party company to get these features, which are free with a full web hosting package.

Now we see more and more providers and resellers who try to push the price increase down to their customers, or to switch to alternative (and sometimes inferior) control panel software.

ICDSoft’s Control Panel has always been (and will always be) free with every hosting account. WHM's counterpart on our side – ICDSoft’s Account Panel - has also always been free.

Using the ICDSoft cPanel migrator

Since cPanel is the de facto standard among most hosting providers, we have built a tool allowing us to easily import all files, databases, and emails from a cPanel backup. This tool has been available for many years and thousands of clients have used it with great success. The main hurdle in moving a cPanel account usually is getting the backup from the previous hosting provider. Backup systems in cPanel are often handled by remote systems and third-party plugins, and our experience when performing the free site migrations we offer are that the backup feature is too often neglected by the hosting providers.

Step 1 - Finding the cPanel backup section

First, you need to locate the cPanel Backup section in your account. Due to the different configuration and modules, the section can have various names. In the picture below, you can see the name and location in an example cPanel account we have at a cPanel hosting provider:

Step 2 - Full website backup

After you enter the cPanel Backup section, choose the "Download a Full Website Backup". There are other options, but restoring from them is more difficult.

Step 3 - Backup file location

Choose the location for the backup. If there is enough disk space on your account, choose the "Home Directory" option, as it gives you more options for the download afterwards. If you don't have enough space, you can try some of the other options, but do note that they can often fail due to lack of space as well, as they need to store a temporary backup file in your account. If there isn't enough disk space on the account and you can't free up enough space, you can request a full cPanel backup from your provider, or use a more advanced transfer via SSH/FTP (or ask our support team to migrate your account for free).

After you choose the proper option, make sure that your email is correct and proceed.

Step 4 - Waiting for the backup to finish

Sometimes, the backup may take quite some time to be generated. Allow sufficient time for the backup generation to complete, but don't forget about it. If you think that the time it takes is too long, contact the support team of your previous provider - backups of large accounts may fail for various reasons.

Step 5 - Downloading the backup

When the backup is ready, you will receive a download link. You can download the backup locally and upload it to your ICDSoft account via the ICDSoft's Control Panel. This is perhaps the easiest way to do this.

Step 5.1 Configuring FTP download

If you don't want to download the backup locally, we recommend a direct FTP transfer to our server. Before you can download the backup on our server, you need to ensure that you have an FTP account with read access to the home/ folder of your cPanel account (where the backup is usually located). To do that, navigate to the "FTP Accounts" section in cPanel:

Step 5.2 Check your FTP accounts

Most cPanel accounts have special FTP accounts which have access to the home/ directory by default. If you have such an account, you don't need to create a new one.

Step 5.3 Creating an FTP account

If you wish, you can create an FTP account for this task only:

Step 6 - Locating the cPanel Migration tool

After you log in to the ICDSoft Control Panel, locate the "Migration" section:

Step 7 - Downloading the backup to the server via FTP

In the Migration section, select the "cPanel" option and click "Continue". Then, locate the FTP connection section and enter the FTP credentials you configured at your previous cPanel-based host:

After you enter your credentials, click the folder icon to open a remote file picker where you can select the cPanel backup file:

Select the file, click the "Select" button and the path to the file will be filled. Then, click the "Continue" button for the FTP Migration. After proceeding, you will see a progress screen while we download and inspect the file: