Leaving 123-Reg: domains, email and hosting, step by step

Here is the thing worth knowing before you start leaving 123-Reg: you almost certainly do not have to move all of it at once. The domain, the mailboxes and the hosting only look like one product because they share a login. Each can be dealt with on its own week.

For most businesses the sensible sequence is to move the website first, because it is the part that is costing you speed and worry, then the mail once the site has settled, and then the domain whenever you feel like tidying up. Nothing forces you to do the lot on a Friday afternoon.

Take a copy that is actually complete

A website is two things: a pile of files and a database. Miss either and you have half a site, which behaves worse than no site at all because it looks fine until somebody clicks something.

Get the files by FTP or SFTP if you can, or by making an archive in the file manager and downloading that. Include the hidden files. On a Linux server, anything beginning with a dot is hidden by default, and one of those dot files is .htaccess, which holds your redirects and quite possibly the rules that keep your URLs working. FTP clients often skip it unless you tell them not to.

Then check what you downloaded. Open the folder, count roughly, look for the uploads or images directory and confirm it is not suspiciously small. Transfers stall. An archive that stopped at 60 per cent still opens.

The database is the half people forget

Everything written since the site was built lives in the database. Pages, products, orders, form entries, user accounts, settings. Export it from phpMyAdmin or whatever database tool the panel provides, and take the whole thing rather than a table at a time.

Two things to look at in the export. The character set, because sites built years ago are often on an older collation, and importing that into a modern server without thinking is how apostrophes turn into strings of question marks across every page. And the size, since a shop with years of orders behind it can produce a file too big to import through a browser, which means it needs doing on the command line instead. Better to know that now than at eleven at night.

The database login details are in a configuration file among your website files, and it is worth finding it early. It also tells you the database name, which is handy when the panel lists four of them and nobody can remember which belongs to the live site.

What breaks when the site lands somewhere new

Most moved sites come up first time and never trouble anybody again. When one does not, the reason is on this short list.

• PHP version. An older site moved onto a modern PHP suddenly throws errors it never threw before. The fix is to land it on a version close to what it was running on, get it stable, and then work forwards deliberately rather than all in one go. If your old host has already written to you with a date on it, there is more on what an unsupported PHP version actually means.
• Contact forms going quiet. If the site has been handing its mail straight to the local server, it will keep trying to do that on the new one and may simply be ignored. No error on screen, no message in your inbox. Set the site up to send through a proper authenticated mailbox and the problem goes away for good.
• Paths written into the code. Old bespoke sites love an absolute path to a folder that only exists on the old machine. They are easy to fix once you know to look.
• File permissions and ownership. Uploads stop working, caches cannot be written, and the site looks fine until somebody tries to add a photo.
• Scheduled tasks. Anything set up as a cron job in the old panel is not in your file copy. Backups, feed imports, the nightly script somebody wrote in 2018.

Test the new copy properly before the public sees it. Not the homepage. Go to the deepest page you can find, submit a form, log in as a normal customer, and check the pages that were unusual on the old site. If it is WordPress, our WordPress hosting page covers what we set up on our side to keep it quick and patched once it lands.

If your mailboxes are there too

Mail does not come with the website and it never has. Messages sit on the mail server, so they get copied mailbox by mailbox with both accounts open at once, and only afterwards do the MX records change.

The awkward part is usually the people, not the technology. Everybody’s phone needs its settings changed on the same day, and there is always one director on holiday. Our advice is to do mail as its own separate week, with a date everyone has been told about twice.

The domain, and the tag that moves it

Leaving the name registered at 123-Reg for the rest of its natural life is a perfectly good outcome. It costs you nothing but one more login to remember, and the website can move without it.

If you would rather have it with everything else, .uk domains work in a way that surprises anyone who has only ever moved a .com. There is no transfer code. Nominet, which runs .uk, identifies each registrar by a short tag, and a transfer happens when your current registrar changes the tag on your domain to the new registrar’s. The domain then shows up in the new account waiting to be accepted, and if nobody accepts it, it sits in limbo. So ask your new provider for their tag first, then request the change, then check the new account actually has it.

For a .com or .org from the same account, it is the familiar routine instead: turn the domain lock off, request the authorisation code, pass it to the new registrar, approve the email.

While you are in there, check who the registrant is. Not the billing contact, the registrant. If it says the name of a developer you parted company with in 2019, sort that out before you do anything else, because that is the field that says who owns the name. Our domain names page explains what happens next if the name on the record belongs to somebody you can no longer get hold of.

Leaving 123-Reg FAQs

Where 123-Reg stands

They have been a fixture of the UK domain market for a very long time and have a huge number of .uk names on their books. Domains renew, the panel works, and if all you need is somewhere to park a name, it is hard to see what you would be leaving for. Worth knowing that their parent company, Host Europe Group, was bought by GoDaddy in 2017, so moving between the two is less of a change of company than it looks.

Hosting is the part that tends to prompt a move. Shared plans at that price point are busy machines, the renewal figure is not the sign-up figure, and low-cost hosting sold at national scale is a product rather than a relationship. None of that is dishonest, it is just what large-scale, low-cost hosting is. It stops suiting you on the day the website turns into the thing that keeps the diary full.

Hand it over instead

This is routine work here. Give us the logins, or just the domain and a rough idea of what is where, and we will take the copy, rebuild it on our servers, check it against the live site page by page, and tell you before we change anything. Moving in is included rather than an extra line on the invoice, your 123-Reg account is left running and untouched, and the hosting bill starts at £1 a day + VAT, managed, on UK servers.

Old sites are welcome, including the ones on PHP versions that make other hosts wince. We have kept plenty of them running safely for years.