Migrating hosting provider

My blog and other content was hosted on Online.net. Instead of relying too much on Google, I also have all my emails synced to a secondary mail provider as a backup measure. I recently changed hosting providers due to an offer change and a big price increase with respect to my needs.

Original setup

I had a setup with my domain, this very website and emails backup / mirror hosted on Scaleway.
A VPS cron task syncs daily emails from Google to Scaleway via the great Imapsync:

docker run --rm gilleslamiral/imapsync imapsync \
  --user1 $USER1@gmail.com \
  --password1 $USER1_PASSWORD \
  --gmail1 \
  --exclude "^Chats\." \
  --host2 $HOST2  \
  --user2 $USER_HOST2 \
  --password2 $USER_HOST2_PASSWORD \
  --ssl2 --delete2

Due to recent offer change and price increase from Scaleway (essentially moving out from Online.net to Scaleway dedicated offer), I now had the registrar on Online.net and the hosting on Scaleway, and on top of that some HTTPS certificate woes.
I decided to switch provider to OVH.

Switching provider

The first step was to get a new web-hosting plan at OVH. I already have an account, pretty straigthforward.

Content and domain migration

Once the new account was setup, I then:

  • moved out the blog first and hosted domains from Scaleway to OVH
  • created virtualhosts on OVH for each domains
  • updated the DNS on Scaleway to move to point to the new OVH hosted domains

After waiting a bit for DNS propagation, the content was migrated successfully.

Email and domain transfer

The email and domain transfer was a bit trickier, as I could not create emails in OVH without first transferring the domain.
So I initiated the domain transfer from Online.net to OVH, this allowed the new DNS Zone to be created on OVH, and also unlocked the Email feature (yeah!…).

Having now access to emails, I could transfer the rest of the remaining stuff from Scaleway:

  • sync my mails to OVH via imapsync like above to the new mail host
  • update the MX on Scaleway to point to the new servers on OVH (+ DKIM)
  • do the same thing on OVH side, so that the two DNS zones look the same
  • wait for the domain transfer to finish

After ensuring everything was fine for a few days, I closed the account on Scaleway.

Conclusion

I only migrated because Scaleway offer and upgrade from the Online.net hosting was:

  • (much) more expensive: I went from 5€/month to 10€/month VAT-excluded, whereas it was only 3.29€/month VAT-excluded on OVH
  • more restrictive: I only had access to 2 email addresses and I needed to upgrade the plan in order to use them
  • buggy: I had a lot of certificate renewal problems with Online.net (not saying it will not happen with OVH…)

Not difficult at all, but a bit of time lost and some configuration setup for such small stuff…