Anyone has migrated from Cpanel to Interworx with a dedicated server in LiquidWeb WebHosting?

Hi,
I am a LiquidWeb client, I have a dedicated server with them (with Cpanel) where I host thousands of domains. They have offered me to migrate to Interworx (I want to do it to avoir the new expensive costs of Cpanel)

Do you have a dedicated server with them? Did you migrate? Is both answers are YES, did you experienced any problems after migration? If you have hosting with them but you didtn´t migrate: why?

I am really happy with LiquidWeb support but I am just afraid that something could go wrong with the migration

Thanks,

Hi Kevin250

Welcome to IW forums

I am not with with liquidweb, but have been using IW since 2012 and have imported many sites from Cpanel over the years.

I would consider Liquidweb to be best placed in importing Cpanel accounts, as they own and direct access to IW, so if there are any issues, a resolution would be found quickly. I would also appreciate that they have migrated many from Cpanel already and are aware of any issues which may arise during the migration.

Please understand, there are differences between Cpanel and IW which may appear to be a migration issue, but is just the difference between the 2 control panels.

Hopefully another user may post their experience as you posted, but I suspect is unlikely as IW in the main, just works and I think you may have better luck if you post on Liquidweb forums.

Many thanks

John

I ran into import size issues - I had a small amount of accounts but I would consider doing some tests with about 5 sites and this will give you an idea.

Importing obviously is non destructive and can be done and tweaked until you’re ready for the bulk to move.

edit" meant to reply to OP

@Kevin250

Sorry for the late reply. I was away last week.

We did a lot of work last year to improve the existing import tools handling of Cpanel accounts. Part of that was so that LW could better integrate its own migration strategy with the import tool. They shouldn’t have any trouble transferring large numbers of accounts. Or large single accounts for that matter. They use incremental transfer scripts.

If your DNS is handled by LW they can handle that side too. They also have some limited automated site testing tools that can help.

Migrations are rarely seamless though even when going to the same control panel. So if possible try to stretch out the migration and do it in small batches. Get a feel for the issues your clients run into so you can sort them out ahead of time in the next batch. Feel free to contact us here or via our support system if there is an issue LW is having a hard time with or if you want a second opinion.

I have a dedicated server with Liquid Web, and they migrated my ~30 sites from WHM/cPanel to IW a couple of years ago.

There are a few gotchas that you need to be aware of. Liquid Web does have a document regarding the migration, but there is at least one error due to out-of-date information. For example, it says that “InterWorx’s mail program does not support SMTP on port 465. If you use port 465, you will need to update your mail clients to connect on 587 instead.” That is not true; however, it is a good idea to upgrade your mail clients to port 587…

One question I would ask if I were you is what OS Liquid Web will be using for your new server. Since everyone is moving away from CentOS, it would be nice if they were using something else so that you don’t have to migrate again to get an new OS when that situation is settled.

One other issue I ran into was that I was using DNSSEC for all my domains, and Interworx did not support it at the time of my migration, so I had to disable it in WHM and at the registrar prior to the going live.

I was also using WHM’s backup to a separate drive, which IW didn’t support via the GUI; however, IW Support provided me with a very nice script I run via a cron as root that does the trick flawlessly.

Given your large number of sites, the other thing you’ll need to check into is SSL certificates. IW uses Let’s Encrypt for them, and if you’re bringing over a bunch of cPanel/Comodo SSL certs, you may run into Let’s Encrypt’s caps on new certificates when you try to set up a bunch.

Another issue I ran into was with ModSecurity rules in IW. I was running the OWASP rules without any issues in WHM/cPanel, but I had some significant growing pains using the OWASP rules with ModSecurity in IW with WordPress, WHMCS, and phpBB3. I currently have it working pretty well, though there are occasional issues with phpBB3 sites and WordPress that need to be addressed.

Overall, the migration was well-handled by Liquid Web, and I am very pleased with IW. I’m still using IW 6.x at this point, and looking forward to upgrading to 7.x once they have that working. You will be using 7.x for your migration, I assume, so you’ll have all the new bells and whistles.

Hello–

Just a note that IW7 has been live and production ready for a while now. If you’d like a demo key to give it a test run, just submit a ticket to support.interworx.com, and I’ll hook you up.

Also, we launched a plugin earlier in the year that will automatically do backups of all SiteWorx accounts daily/weekly/monthly and backups can be stored on a separate drive–it basically kind of does what your script does, just from the GUI. So that may be useful for you in the future.

Here is some documentation (the doc is for 7, since that’s the version all new documentation is being written for, but the plugin is also in 6, so the only difference is button names): How To: Enable and Use the SiteWorx Backups Cron Plugin — InterWorx documentation

Currently, InterWorx only supports CentOS 7/RHEL7/CloudLinux 7, so all migrations will be at least CentOS adjacent (I think LW uses CentOS 7). We will continue to support CentOS 7 at least until it goes EOL in 2024, so that is some time from now. I believe it was decided that AlmaLinux will be the eventual replacement, though no ETA (it is on the roadmap for this year).