Performing server migrations play a critical role in our Outsourced Tech Support services for web hosting companies. A business expansion or need for enhanced security, anything can trigger a server migration.

cPanel and Plesk are the major control panels used in web hosting servers. As a result, migrating accounts from cPanel to Plesk or vice versa, is a commonly scheduled task by our dedicated support techs.

At Bobcares, server migrations are executed with proper planning and utmost caution, or else it can lead to website downtime. Today, we’ll see how we handle cPanel to Plesk migrations efficiently for our customers who are web hosts.

cPanel to Plesk pre-migration check points

To ensure a seamless migration process, we always follow a pre-migration checklist to prepare the two servers before starting the migration. Otherwise, there are chances that the migration fails in between and lead to loss of time and effort.

At Bobcares, our dedicated support specialists have expertise performing migration tasks without incurring much downtime. Here are the major tasks we perform before doing the cPanel to Plesk migration:

1. We ensure that adequate disk space is available in both the source (cPanel) and destination (Plesk) servers. We ensure that the free space in source is approximately equal to the data to be transferred and in destination is 5-10 GB more than that.
2. We verify that the cPanel and Plesk versions are compatible to perform transfer using the Migration manager. Though cPanel version 9, 10, or 11 should work, we always keep the versions latest and updated. The destination server is installed with Parallels Plesk latest version (11.0.9+), with the latest updates.
3. The Plesk Migration and Transfer Manager component is then installed on the Plesk server (destination).
4. To avoid IP related issues, we assign at least one shared IP address and the same number of dedicated IP addresses in the Plesk server, as in the source cPanel server.
5. If there are mailing lists in source server, we install and configure Mailman mailing list manager in Plesk server to handle them.
6. For the destination server to connect to source server, we allow the Plesk server IP in the cPanel server firewall and configure source to accept SSH connections from the destination server for root user.
7. During the migration process, we keep SELinux disabled on the destination server.
8. cPanel and Plesk have different paths to store the virtual hosts. If the destination server is new, we change the location of virtual hosts on the destination server from ‘/var/www/vhosts’ to ‘/home’, for a seamless transfer.

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Performing cPanel to Plesk migration

Depending on the size and speed of the network, the time for migration may vary. We make a rough estimate based on the total data and schedule the migration during off-peak hours for quick transfer.

We then configure the ‘Migration & Transfer Manager’ in the Plesk interface with the source server details such as IP address, password, upload path, data to the transferred and the custom rules to be applied in case of conflicts during migration.

A major task to perform here is the ‘IP address mapping’, where we map the shared IP and the dedicated IPs in the source cPanel server to the corresponding IP addresses in the Plesk server.

Once the migration is completed, we check the report to verify that it has successfully copied over. In many cases, we’ve seen errors being reported during the migration, which we then analyze and fix before trying to re-copy.

Limitations of Migration agent and how we tackle them

Though the migration agent helps to perform cPanel to Plesk migration with less manual effort, it has some limitations, which we overcome with our expert migration assistance services.

1. For instance, FTP account passwords are not migrated, but generated as new passwords for FTP users, which we track and update the users.
2. DNS zones are not migrated by the agent, so we edit the DNS records of the domains post migration and make the custom settings that are required in them.
3. Cron jobs, SSL certificates, IP blacklists, Domain keys, Apache modules such as Perl and PHP extensions, custom domain level settings etc. are some of the other data that are not transferred by the agent, so we manually configure them in the destination server.
4. Another issue we’ve seen during migration using the agent is that, database user accounts with several databases under a single domain get split into multiple user accounts. As this can affect the functioning of database-driven website applications, we manually take the database dump from source, securely copy and restore them in the destination server.

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How to migrate data for older versions of Plesk

For older versions of Plesk, such as Plesk 9, there is no cPanel migration agent by default. So we install it manually and then proceed with the migration via interface or command line:

1. We connect to the destination Plesk server via SSH and confirm that Plesk migrator is installed.
2. Then we configure it with the access details of source and destination servers and other settings.
3. We then prepare the list of domains and data to be migrated and perform IP mapping for them.
4. After successfully completing pre-migration checks, we perform the migration and validate its success.

For servers with custom settings, not having enough disk space, bad hard disk, older versions of control panels, etc. account move via the migration agent will not work.

In such scenarios, we split the migration or manually migrate the entire data from the cPanel to Plesk server, by copying over the domain data, databases, email data, etc. and recreating them in the correct format in the destination server.

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How we ensure a successful cPanel to Plesk migration

Any inadequate point in the pre-migration checklist, can cause a failure in the migration. Disk space getting filled up fast, interruption in SSH or even a custom entry in ‘.bashrc’ file can generate migration errors.

With our fool-proof pre-migration preparation and continual monitoring of the migration process, we ensure that the migration gets completed 100%, without any errors.

As an additional pro-active measure, or in cases where the DNS sync is not yet completed, we sync the data contents between source and destination servers again after initial migration.

This synchronization helps us to ensure that the already migrated data is updated with the changes made in the source server after the migration process, when DNS is not switched to the new server.

Our 24/7 skilled engineers also secure the destination server using firewalls and custom security tweaking for all services. Other custom settings for performance and resource management are also done by our team in the server.

To minimize the downtime for active domains, we update the DNS records for them after setting the TTL to a very low value at first and then updating them to point to the new IP addresses.

Once the migration is completed, we test the websites, especially the database-driven applications, and confirm that they are working fine. This helps us to timely detect and fix any missing links.

We’ve been able to prevent server incidents by up to 15% by using our proactive server checks (click here to see how we improve web hosting support).