Moving a live website to a new host is one of the most common reasons clients are wary of switching providers — the fear is downtime, lost email, or a broken site. Our transfer process is built specifically to avoid all three.
What we need from you
- Access to your current hosting account (cPanel login, or your existing host's client area login so we can request it on your behalf)
- Your domain registrar login, or confirmation of who currently manages your DNS
- Any custom email accounts currently in use, so we can migrate mailboxes alongside the site
If you don't have access to your current host, we can usually still proceed — most registrars allow a domain to be pointed elsewhere without needing the old host's cooperation.
How the migration works
- We take a full copy of your site's files and database from the existing host, without touching the live version.
- We rebuild the site on our infrastructure in a staging environment and test it privately — forms, database connections, plugins, and email routing are all checked before anything goes live.
- Once you've approved the staging version, we update your domain's DNS to point to us. DNS changes propagate gradually (typically within a few hours, occasionally up to 24-48 hours depending on your registrar's TTL settings), during which your site keeps working from wherever it's currently pointed.
- We monitor the cutover and confirm the live site, email, and any forms are functioning correctly on the new infrastructure.
What about downtime?
Because we build and test the new environment before switching DNS, there's no window where your site is simply offline. The only thing that changes during the transfer is which server answers when someone visits your domain — and that changeover is gradual, not a hard cutoff.
After the transfer
Once you're on our infrastructure, you get access to your own WebAcumen client account for billing, support tickets, and hosting management — see Getting Started With Your WebAcumen Client Portal for what that covers.