Migrating a live hosting server is one of the most stressful operations in this industry. You have dozens or hundreds of active sites, resellers with their own customers underneath them, databases tied to specific domains, mailboxes whose passwords exist nowhere in plaintext, and a hard requirement that nothing goes down while you work. Traditional approaches mean days of manual effort, carefully staged cutovers, and a long list of things that can quietly break.
Panelica has a built-in migration engine designed to remove that friction. It connects to your existing server, reads its full structure, and rebuilds everything on Panelica -- accounts, sites, databases, email, SSL, DNS -- in a single guided flow. The source server stays online and read-only the entire time. This is not a restore-from-backup migration. It is a live, structured transfer of an entire hosting environment.
What does the Panelica migration tool do?
The migration engine moves a complete hosting server to Panelica automatically. It works across three major control panels -- cPanel/WHM, Plesk and DirectAdmin -- and detects the panel type without manual configuration. Every component a hosted site depends on is included:
- Websites and files -- Document roots, application files and configurations, with permissions and ownership preserved.
- Databases -- All databases and their users, matched to the domain they belong to, adapted for the target engine version.
- Email accounts and mailboxes -- Mailbox contents transferred. Where a password cannot be recovered from the source, a new one is generated and reported explicitly.
- SSL certificates -- Existing certificates carried over so sites remain HTTPS on day one.
- DNS zones -- Zone files transferred so DNS resolution works immediately on the target.
- Cron jobs -- Scheduled tasks recreated under the correct account.
How does the migration work, step by step?
Everything runs through a single wizard in the Panelica dashboard. No command-line scripting, no manual rsync, no intermediate staging server.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Connect | Provide the source server address and credentials. Panelica identifies whether it is running cPanel/WHM, Plesk or DirectAdmin automatically -- no manual selection required. |
| 2. Discover | Panelica scans the source and builds a complete inventory: every account, every domain, every database, every mailbox and every certificate. You see the full picture before anything moves. |
| 3. Configure | Select which sites or accounts to migrate. Confirm the ownership structure Panelica detected. Assign hosting plans. The scope is fully configurable -- migrate the entire server or a specific subset. |
| 4. Migrate | Accounts are created, files transferred, databases imported, email migrated, SSL installed and DNS zones loaded -- site by site, with live progress for each step. |
| 5. Verify | Each migrated site is checked automatically. You see which sites are accessible on Panelica before you touch DNS. You switch when you are ready. |
How does Panelica preserve the reseller and customer hierarchy?
This is the part that breaks most migration approaches. When a reseller has fifteen customers and each customer has multiple domains, a naive migration collapses everything into a flat list of users. You end up spending hours sorting out who owns what.
Panelica reads the ownership tree from the source panel and rebuilds it faithfully. Resellers are created as resellers. Their customers are created under them. Each domain lands on the account that owned it on the source server. If one customer had ten domains, those ten domains are grouped under one account on Panelica -- not scattered across ten separate entries.
This matters for hosting providers directly. Your billing system, your support workflows, your resource allocation -- all of it depends on the account structure. A migration that flattens that structure creates weeks of remediation work. Panelica's engine is designed so that when the migration finishes, your account tree on Panelica looks exactly as it did on the source panel, mapped correctly to Panelica's four-level hierarchy: root, admin, reseller and user.
How does Panelica handle the things that usually break a migration?
Database engine version differences
Source and target servers often run different MySQL or MariaDB versions. A dump written for an older version can fail on a newer one due to reserved keyword changes, strict mode differences or character set defaults. Panelica adapts the data during transfer so it imports cleanly, and it ensures each database is matched to the domain that actually uses it -- not dropped into a general pool waiting to be manually reconnected.
Email passwords that cannot be recovered
Mailbox passwords are stored as one-way hashes on the source server. You cannot reverse a hash. Rather than silently dropping those accounts or leaving them with blank credentials, Panelica generates a new secure password for each mailbox where the original cannot be transferred, and produces a clear report listing exactly which accounts changed. Nothing is lost and nothing happens silently.
Keeping the source server live throughout
Panelica reads from the source server using its existing management interfaces. It never writes to the source, never restarts its services and never takes it offline. Your existing customers keep receiving traffic on the old server while the migration runs in parallel. You decide when to point DNS at Panelica. There is no forced maintenance window.
Automatic account creation
One of the hidden costs of traditional migrations is pre-staging: creating every user account on the target panel before you can import anything. Panelica creates all accounts for you -- with secure credentials -- as part of the migration flow. Users and their ownership relationships are linked automatically. No pre-creation, no manual mapping sheets.
Real-world result: 110 sites, 41 customers, 0 errors
The migration engine has been validated on production servers. In a recent live run, a Plesk server with 110 active sites was migrated to Panelica. The source had 41 customers and 1 reseller. Every site, database, mailbox and certificate transferred without error. The full reseller-customer hierarchy was preserved exactly as it existed on the source. The source server stayed online throughout.
That outcome does not happen by accident. It comes from building the engine around the specific ways real hosting servers are structured: multiple ownership levels, inconsistent naming conventions, databases that do not always align neatly with domain names, mailboxes that have been running for years. Every production migration we run improves the engine for the next one.
Which control panels can I migrate from?
Panelica currently supports migration from:
- cPanel / WHM -- Full account hierarchy including resellers, customers and addon domains. Read the cPanel migration walkthrough.
- Plesk -- Subscription and reseller structure, all panel-managed databases, mailboxes and certificates. Read the Plesk migration walkthrough.
- DirectAdmin -- Admin, reseller and user level accounts with their full domain trees.
- HestiaCP and CyberPanel -- Account and file transfer supported.
Additional panels are in active development. The source panel type is detected at the Connect step -- you never need to tell Panelica what it is connecting to.
Why Panelica keeps investing in migration
Migration is the single biggest practical barrier to switching panels. Hosting companies operate on inertia -- not because their current panel is good, but because moving looks too risky and too expensive. We build and maintain the migration engine because we want that barrier to be as low as it can be.
That means handling the unusual setups: servers that have been running for a decade with accumulated configuration drift, resellers who have resellers, databases with character encoding edge cases, certificates in unexpected states. The engine improves with each production deployment, and we keep developing it because the goal is simple -- make leaving an old panel a procedure that takes hours, not weeks.
If you run a hosting company, manage client environments across multiple accounts, or are simply tired of paying for a panel you cannot modernize, start a free trial at panelica.com. No credit card required, full platform available from day one.
Frequently asked questions
Which control panels can I migrate from to Panelica?
cPanel/WHM, Plesk and DirectAdmin are fully supported. HestiaCP and CyberPanel are also supported. Panelica detects the source panel type automatically at connection time.
Will my websites go down during the migration?
No. The source server stays online and strictly read-only throughout the migration. Your sites keep serving traffic until you choose to switch DNS to the Panelica server.
Does Panelica preserve the reseller and customer hierarchy?
Yes. The full ownership tree is detected on the source server and rebuilt on Panelica. Resellers stay resellers, their customers stay under them, and every domain is grouped under the correct account.
Are databases migrated automatically and matched to the right domain?
Yes. Each database is matched to the domain that uses it and imported with its users intact. The engine adapts data for version differences between source and target during transfer.
What happens to email passwords during migration?
Passwords stored as recoverable hashes are transferred. Where a password cannot be recovered from the source, Panelica generates a new secure one and reports exactly which accounts were changed.
Do I need to create accounts on Panelica before starting the migration?
No. Panelica creates all accounts automatically with secure credentials as part of the migration process. No pre-staging required.
Can I migrate only selected sites instead of the whole server?
Yes. You can migrate the full server in one run or select specific accounts and domains. The scope is set at the Configure step before anything moves.
Is Panelica self-hosted?
Yes. Panelica installs on your own Linux server (Ubuntu 22.04/24.04, Debian 12/13, AlmaLinux 9, Rocky Linux 9) and runs entirely under your control. It supports 31 languages and installs in under three minutes.