cPanel Migration to DirectAdmin

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Corey

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Hi All,

cPanel was unfortunately acquired by a venture capital company earlier this year which resulted in them changing the pricing structure for cPanel. Under the new structure the licensing is no longer done by server but by account, which is not sustainable for free hosting as we'd be paying thousands of dollars per server per month just in licensing.

We've been attempting to work out a deal on this licensing but have been unable to come to an agreement so we will need to migrate free hosting from cPanel to DirectAdmin. We're also going to take this opportunity to clean up a lot of old systems and records that have been accumulating for the past 15 years. This will undoubtedly be the largest maintenance we've performed to date and we do expect some issues.

While we've thoroughly tested the migration process to minimize impact to accounts I expect we'll run into issues once we start migrating live data and accounts, especially with the age and history of some of our accounts being over 10 years old. I'm hoping to complete this migration over the next week. If you're using our DNS servers you should see little to no downtime of your actual website though accounting functions such as logging into cPanel to manage things may be limited while we update the backend systems. If you're not using our DNS servers please look for a follow up post as the IP address of your website will be changing as it is migrated.

Inactivity suspensions will not be imposed until the migration is completed as we do expect interruptions to your ability to login the backend during this time. Our first priority is making sure the websites stay up and working along with email and FTP.

More information to follow this weekend as we start the migrations.

* We have multiple full backups of every account stored offsite, if something goes wrong with your account migration or anything is missing we do have it backed up and safe.
 

Anna

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All accounts are moved as of a few weeks ago, if you find something not working with your account (such as login issues, unsuspension not working etc), let us know so we can look into it.

There are some backend work remaining though.

If you have a custom domain that does NOT use our name servers ( i.e. they use cloudflare, registrars or other service) you need to manually update those with the proper A record (and any other that you need) for the new servers.

x11 = 198.91.81.11
x12 = 198.91.81.12
x13 = 198.91.81.13
x14 = 198.91.81.14
x15 = 198.91.81.15

The old servers are online for backup purposes so you may see what you expect even without the change, but the old servers will be taken offline at a point not too far in the future.
 

Anna

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As part of this maintenance we will update the backend systems tonight (last I heard at least), meaning within the next 12 hours.

During final testing we did find a few more bugs so the new backend launch is delayed for now.

While we hope for a smooth transition there may be a period of time where logins could be a bit off during the process.

There will only be some small things that change in the panel at this point.
 

Anna

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As some of you may have noticed, we've now started pulling the plug on the old servers.

So if you have not yet updated A records on your personal domains that use any other name servers then ours, now is the time to do it. Otherwise your personal domains will no longer work.

Also make sure your FTP clients is properly configured with the new servers hostname (or using your own domain as host).

Some of you might notice a slight loss of changes if you failed to update the A records earlier and made edits while pointed at the old server, backups will be taken from the old servers shortly before they are taken offline, so we would be able to restore if you don't have your own set of backups.

Here's the list of A records to be using again:

x11 = 198.91.81.11
x12 = 198.91.81.12
x13 = 198.91.81.13
x14 = 198.91.81.14
x15 = 198.91.81.15
 
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