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

You do not have to move it all at once

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

For most businesses the sensible sequence is the website first, because it is the part costing you speed and worry, then the mail once the site has settled, 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 is worse than none because it looks fine until somebody clicks something.

Get the files by FTP or SFTP, or make an archive in the file manager and download it. Include the hidden files. On a Linux server anything beginning with a dot is hidden, and one of those is .htaccess, which holds your redirects and possibly the rules that keep your URLs working. FTP clients often skip it. Then check what you downloaded: find the uploads or images folder and confirm it is not suspiciously small. Transfers stall, and an archive that stopped at 60 per cent still opens.

Everything written since the site was built lives in the database: pages, products, orders, form entries, accounts, settings. Export the whole thing from phpMyAdmin or the panel's database tool. Look at two things. The character set, because older sites often use an older collation, and importing it carelessly turns apostrophes into question marks across every page. And the size, because a shop with years of orders can produce a file too big to import through a browser, which means the command line. Better to know at the start than at eleven at night.

The database login sits in a configuration file among your site files. Find it early: it also names the database, which helps when the panel lists four and nobody knows which is live.

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 usually on this list.

• PHP version. An older site dropped onto a modern PHP throws errors it never threw before. Land it on a version close to what it was running, get it stable, then work forwards deliberately. If your host has written with a date, read what an unsupported PHP version actually means.
• Contact forms going quiet. A site handing mail to the local server may simply be ignored on the new one, with no error. Send through a proper authenticated mailbox and the problem goes away.
• Paths written into the code. Old bespoke sites love an absolute path to a folder that only existed on the old machine. Easy to fix once you know to look.
• Permissions and ownership. Uploads fail and caches cannot be written, so the site looks fine until somebody adds a photo.
• Scheduled tasks. Cron jobs set up in the old panel are not in your file copy: backups, feed imports, the nightly script somebody wrote in 2018.

Test the new copy before the public sees it. Not the homepage: the deepest page you can find, a form submission, a login as a normal customer. If it is WordPress, our WordPress hosting page covers what we set up once it lands.

Mailboxes and the domain

Mail never comes with the website. Messages sit on the mail server, so they get copied mailbox by mailbox with both accounts open, and only then do the MX records change. The awkward part is usually people rather than technology: every phone needs new settings on the same day, and one director is always on holiday. Do mail as its own week, with a date everyone has been told twice. Our sister site covers email hosting if the mail needs a new home.

Leaving the name registered at 123-Reg is a perfectly good outcome; the website can move without it. If you do move a .uk domain, there is no transfer code. Nominet identifies each registrar by a tag, your current registrar changes the tag to the new one's, and the domain then has to be accepted in the new account or it sits in limbo. A .com or .org uses the familiar routine: remove the lock, then pass the authorisation code to the new registrar. The detail is in transferring a .co.uk domain.

While you are in there, check the registrant, not the billing contact. If it names a developer you parted company with years ago, sort that first, because that field says who owns the name. See checking who owns your domain.

Where 123-Reg stands, and handing it over

123-Reg has been a fixture of the UK domain market for a long time and has a huge number of .uk names on its 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. Its parent company, Host Europe Group, was bought by GoDaddy in 2017, so moving between the two is less of a change 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 always the sign-up figure, and low-cost hosting at national scale is a product rather than a relationship. That is not dishonest. It just stops suiting you once the website is what keeps the diary full.

This is routine work for us. Give us the logins, or just the domain and a rough idea of what is where, and we take the copy, rebuild it on our UK servers, check it against the live site page by page, and tell you before we change anything. Your 123-Reg account is left running and untouched. Old sites are welcome, including ones on PHP versions that make other hosts wince. dijihost Complete Hosting is £1 a day + VAT with migration included (moving more than 5 email accounts may be charged). Order online or call 01623 650333.

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