FREE WEBSITE TRANSFER POLICIES AND PROCEDURES
Last Updated: December 28th, 2014
The free website transfer policies and procedures for Hernandez IT Services, Inc. ("The Company") is provided to give our customers and users a clear understanding of what The Company expects to receive from them prior to beginning a free website transfer and the limitation of The Company's liability in such transfers.
Use of The Company's free transfer service constitutes acceptance and agreement to this document
LIMITATION OF SERVICE: First and foremost, as your hosting provider, our concern is providing a stable and reliable hosting environment. This free transfer service is a free service with no implied guarantees or verifications of proper transfer. If you wish for a dedicated admin to assist you with moving all aspects of your site and verify the integrity of the transfer, such a service is available at $60.00 per website migration or free if a subscriber of one of our Website Maintenance or IT Services plans. During non-weekdays and times of high demand, it may take us up to 72 hours or longer to perform the free transfer service. It is always advised that when possible you perform the transfer yourself or ask your developer for assistance. Furthermore, please note that the free transfer service only applies to new accounts or account upgrades and is only available within the first 60 days of service initiation or upgrade.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: Prior to making any domain DNS changes, we strongly suggest that have your developer double check that everything was transferred properly and done according to the requirements of your website's needs. While The Company makes all attempts to make website transfers as hassle free and problem free as possible, it is impossible for The Company staff members to foresee all pitfalls and all aspects of each website's transfer needs. Therefore, The Company can not be held liable in case of improper transfer. The customer is ultimately responsible for making sure everything has been transferred properly and the proper configuration changes are made if the website files require access to a backend database to properly function.
OVERALL TRANSFER SIZE LIMITATION: Due to difficulty of transferring large websites, The Company cannot provide a free transfer of sites larger than 5 GB to Personal plan accounts and larger than 10 GB to Business plan accounts.
cPanel account transfers: If your current host uses cPanel (linux hosting), we can do a full backup of your account. If the backup is made properly on their server, the resulting account will be exactly the same as the one on your old host. If your host does not use cPanel, please continue lower to see the different aspects of your site which our free transfer policy covers. To execute a cPanel transfer, we need the following information -
cPanel Hostname/Address
cPanel Username
cPanel Password
Limitation: The integrity of this process depends on your old host's cPanel providing us with a proper backup of all your files. If your host has processes in place to limit resource usage, the backup may be cut short and therefore, the restore will be incomplete. In such cases, we need you to have your host make a manual backup of cPanel and provide us with a URL to download the tar.gz file generated.
Important: If a username change is requested after the acount is moved (or if your username doesn't match your old account), the mysql database names and usernames will change. Therefore, your applications will fail to make a proper connection to the database. You will be required to fix the configuration files of the applications to resolve this issue. We strongly suggest against changing your username when doing a cPanel account transfer.
File Transfers: On both our Windows and Linux services, we will require the following information to do a proper transfer of all files -
FTP Hostname/Address
FTP Username
FTP Password
Path where your website files are stored (may or may not be required depending on the complexity of your old host's setup)
Limitation: Our staff is limited in making any modifications to the files that have been transferred. If any configuration files need to be updated for the site to properly work, you will be responsible for making such modifications or our staff can assist you with such modifications at a very nominal cost.
File/Database Transfer Caveats: It is also worthy to note that even though we have moved the data to the best of our knowledge, there could still be issues with the website and it may require additional changes from your or your developer's end. Please feel free to contact us if you see any issues with your website so that we check the account for you.
MySQL Database Transfers: On both our Windows and Linux services, we will require the following information to do a proper transfer of a database -
PHPMyAdmin URL at your old host with proper username, password and database name or .sql file with the content of the database uploaded to your webspace at The Company or if the mysql database can be accessed remotely, the hostname of the mysql server along with username, password and database name
You will need to have created the new database on our side so we can restore the content into the database - we can attempt to create the database for you and outline the database name in our response
Limitation: On our linux servers, database names and usernames must start with the username of the hosting account followed by an underscore and the actual name of the user or database. This means that you may need to alter the configuration files for your application for everything to work properly. Our free transfer policy does not cover modification to the files. Our staff can assist you with this at a nominal fee.
MSSQL database transfers: On our Windows services, we will require the following to do a proper transfer of a database -
A .bak file of the database from the previous host
You will need to have created the new database on our side so we can restore the content into the database - we can attempt to create the database for you and outline the database name in our response
Limitation: We always run the latest MSSQL database software. If your old host uses a very old MSSQL version, the .bak file may be incompatible (very rare) with our servers.
Email account transfers: If you are using POP3 to access your email accounts, you will simply need to recreate the email accounts on our side as all emails are generally stored on your local computer. If you are using IMAP to access your email accounts, our staff can assist you with moving the contents of each IMAP account at a nominal cost. Moving of emails from your old host's IMAP server to ours is not covered within our free transfer policy.
VPS/Dedicated cPanel Account Transfers: On our linux/cpanel servers, we will need either of the following pieces of information -
root username and password or
URLs pointing to cPanel backup/cpmove files that can be downloaded and restored within your account at The Company
Limitation: We would be using the root username and password to do an automated migration of all cPanel accounts. Depending on the size of accounts and the load on the original server, some accounts may not migrate properly. It is the customer's responsibility to verify the integrity of each transfer and resolve any issues that may be present with each individual account. In case of mass account restores using cpmove/backup files, once again, depending on the size of the account being moved as well as the load on the original server, the backup may be incomplete and result in an incomplete restore. Customer is responsible for verifying the integrity of each restored account and resolve any outstanding issues.
VPS/Dedicated General Account Transfers: Moving from servers without cPanel or moving to our windows servers limits us in simply assisting with mass data movement through FTP or HTTP. The assembling of each account is the responsibility of the customer. To do a mass movement of data, please provide the following -
FTP username and password and the folder where the data exists as well as the folder to migrate the data to locally or
HTTP URL of an archive to download and where to download it to locally