Migrate cPanel to vestaCP

Step 1: Compress website data and download database!

The first step of the transfer begins with obtaining your data from cPanel server. Log in to your cPanel account and open File manager.

Once the file manager is opened you will be presented with various folders, our folder of interest is ‘public_html’, please open this folder.

In this folder all your website public files are located, you need to compress everything contained in this folder and download to your computer.

1. Click ‘Select All’ to select all the files in this folder.
2. Now click compress and choose the compression type zip when prompted.

It will then create a .zip archive in the same directory that you can download, its time you should take a dump of your database as well. Come back to cPanel and open ‘PHPMyAdmin’.

Now you have to select and dump the database.

1. As we only have one database their, we’ve selected that from a list, if you have various databases , then select the one your website is connected to.
2. After selecting the database, click ‘Export’.

Just press ‘Go’ and it will start downloading the database dump file. It’s all from the cPanel side, you are now ready to upload your website content to vestaCP server.

Step 2: Upload Content to your vestaCP Server

Upload your .zip file into your domain root directory (you will have to use FTP) , that you have downloaded from cPanel server. Connect to your site using any FTP client, here used Filezilla.

1. Enter your vestaCP server main IP.
2. Your FTP username.
3. FTP Password.
4. You can leave the port empty, the default will be 21.
5. Click connect , and you will be connected to FTP.

You are now presented with various folders in Filezilla as shown in the image below, just double click on ‘public_html’.

You can just drag and drop the .zip file inside the public_html folder. Before uploading .zip file unzip the folder locally at your computer and upload the unzipped files. To avoid unzip the .zip file via ssh.

At this stage, your website data is successfully uploaded , and you can visit your domain to verify its there. If your website does not have a database you are done here, but if it has database you should continue reading this article.

Step 3: Upload your database

If and only if your website also had a database, you need to upload and connect your website to it before it should start working normally. First of all, you have to create the database in vestaCP. Once the database is created you can log in to PHPMyadmin via this URL:

http://<server ip address>/phpmyadmin/

It will ask you for the username and password.

• Username : The database username you have just created above.
• Password : Database password.

Once logged into database, select the database and click import as seen in the image below:

You will now see the Import screen.

1. Click Browse and upload the .sql file you created from cPanel server.
2. And press ‘Go’ to upload it.

It will take some time (if the SQL file is large) and your database will be successfully restored. Your database is restored but it’s still not connected to the script you are using. Because in your cPanel server your database name might be ‘cpanel_database’. But in vestaCP, it might be ‘vestacp_database’.

Step 4: Connect to database

To connect your script to your new database, you have to tell your script the name of the new database, its username,and updated password. First, you will have to locate the config file where database login details are defined. Most scripts have convention to name that file

1. config.php
2. WordPress usually name it ‘wp-config.php’

If you are not able to find the database configuration file, you can read your script documentation to find out where it is. After that it’s fairly easy, all you need to do is edit the file and replace old database details with the details of the database you have created in Step 3. In WordPress it looks something like this: define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘Your database name goes here’); define(‘DB_USER’, ‘Database username goes here’); define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘Database password goes here’);

After you have successfully modified and saved this file, you are finally done. You can now browse your website and it should be online. If it is still not, make sure you have done everything as described.

Thank you for reading this article.