Migrating cPanel accounts from Reseller to Shared Hosting

This article describes how to migrate cPanel accounts from a reseller hosting package to a shared web hosting package.

Reseller hosting packages allow you to create and manage multiple cPanel accounts, but shared hosting packages are limited to a single cPanel account. Therefore, to move from reseller to shared hosting, you must consolidate all of your sites' content into a single cPanel account. This process involves copying databases and web site files from subaccounts to your primary account. After you consolidate cPanel accounts, you also must set up domains in cPanel so all of the sites work correctly.

Moving web site content

First, you must download the content of each subaccount's web site. This includes the actual web site files, as well as any databases.

Files

To download the web site files, you can use an FTP client. (You can use the cPanel File Manager to transfer files, but a dedicated FTP client makes the job much easier.)

After you download a subaccount's files, upload them to a subdirectory within the public_html directory of your primary cPanel account. Make sure you keep track of which directory contains which site, because you will need this information later when you configure the domains.

Databases

After you consolidate each subaccount's files into the primary cPanel account, you must export the databases from each subaccount and import them into the primary cPanel account:

• For information about how to import and export MySQL databases, please see this article.

• For information about how to import and export PostgreSQL databases, please see this article.

Setting up domains

After you have consolidated all of the subaccounts into the primary cPanel account, the next step is to make the domains load from your primary cPanel account. (If you aren't familiar with the different domain types in cPanel, we have articles that explain subdomains, addon domains, and parked domains.

You must remove the addon and parked domains that are set up in each subaccount, and then add them to the primary cPanel account. After you add all of a subaccount's parked and addon domains to the primary cPanel account, you can remove the subaccount. Then you can add the subaccount's main domain to the primary cPanel account as either an addon or parked domain.

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Important

If you are transferring a subaccount site that is a parked domain, you should set it up in the primary cPanel account as an addon domain. Set the domain's document root folder to the directory that you want to load. Otherwise, the domain will load the main domain of the cPanel account.

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Note

If any of the sites you are transferring has a dedicated IP address, there may be some downtime (up to 24 hours, though usually less) while it switches over to the IP address of your primary cPanel account. Because individual cPanel accounts are limited to a single IP address, they are also limited to a single SSL certificate.

Starting the migration

After you consolidate everything into your primary cPanel account, please open a support ticket at https://my.hosting.com. In the ticket, let us know that your reseller account is ready to switch to a shared hosting package.

Related Articles

• Subdomains

• Getting started with cPanel

• Accessing cPanel