Migrating your existing hosting to Simple Hosting

There are two ways that you can migrate your website to a Gandi Simple Hosting instance, on your own, or by using our website migration service.

Migrating your website by yourself

This implies that you have already purchased a Simple Hosting instance.

Once logged into your account, and in your Simple Hosting instance's control panel:

1. Create your virtual hosts at Gandi

click on “Add” that is under the “Websites” table,
add the address of your existing website (ex. www.yourdomain.com),
add a construction address that you will use to build your website (ex. migration.yourdomain.com).

In both cases, when adding an address, you will see a red message telling you to either add a TXT record in your domain's zone file, or to add a file to the root directory of your already-hosted website. You must do that, and then please wait about 3 hours minimum (if you choose the zone file method), and start the process over again to add the addresses. This time, it will see you have the rights to the domain and it will create the virtual host for you on your instance, and you can proceed with step 2 below.

2. Redirect your maintenance URL

Use our Multi-address interface in your instance's admin interface to create a symlink from maintenance.yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com ( see how),

You will use the maintenance address to see and preview your website before you switch the real website over to it.

3. Set up the new hosting space

Download your files from your existing hosting, and then upload them via SFTP to the htdocs folder that corresponds to the website's address (ex. /vhosts/www.yourdomain.com/htdocs ) (see how),
If your website uses a MySQL database, use our phpMyAdmin interface to create the database and users that correspond to what you already use at your current host (see how)
export your MySQL database using the export function at your current web host, and then use the import function via your phpMyAdmin at Gandi to import your database to Gandi.
make any necessary modifications to your MySQL configuration files to change the database access settings (the database location is at: localhost).

When you are ready to switch over to Gandi's hosting of your website, change your zone file to point your real address to your simple hosting instance's address.

Once the zone file changes are picked up (generally 3 hours, but this can be more or less), your website will be running off of Gandi's Simple Hosting servers. And you can then delete the maintenance url that you were using.

Gandi's website migration service

If you would like to migrate your website to a Gandi Simple Hosting instance, but are not sure that you have the necessary know-how to do this, you can now use our website migration service (in beta testing).

We are currently providing this service via a third-party partner at the price of $65 (€50, or £45) excl. VAT, and only if it meets certain criteria. For more on this, and complete instructions, please visit our blog at: Want us to move your website for you?

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