Migrating hosting provider

My blog and other content was hosted on Online.net. Instead of relying too much on Google, I also had all my emails synced to a secondary mail provider as a backup. I recently changed hosting providers due to a pricing change and a significant increase that no longer matched my needs.

Original setup

I had a setup with my domain, this very website, and email backup / mirroring hosted on Scaleway.
A VPS cron task would sync daily emails from Google to Scaleway using 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 a recent offer change and price increase from Scaleway (essentially migrating services from Online.net to a new Scaleway dedicated offer), I ended up with my domain registered on Online.net, hosting on Scaleway, and on top of that, recurring HTTPS certificate issues.
I decided to switch providers to OVH.

Switching provider

The first step was to get a new web-hosting plan from OVH. I already had an account, so it was pretty straightforward.

Content and domain migration

Once the new account was set up, I:

  • moved the blog and hosted domains from Scaleway to OVH
  • created virtual hosts on OVH for each domain
  • updated the DNS on Scaleway to point to the new OVH-hosted domains

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

Email and domain transfer

The email and domain transfer was a bit trickier, since I could not create email accounts in OVH without first transferring the domain.
So I initiated the domain transfer from Online.net to OVH, which allowed the new DNS zone to be created on OVH, and also unlocked the email feature (finally!).

Once email access was available, I transferred the rest of the setup from Scaleway:

  • synced my mails to OVH using imapsync as described earlier, pointing to the new mail host
  • updated the MX records on Scaleway to point to the new OVH mail servers (with DKIM)
  • mirrored the DNS records on OVH to match the ones from Scaleway
  • waited for the domain transfer to complete

After making sure everything was working properly for a few days, I closed the Scaleway account.

Conclusion

I only migrated because Scaleway’s updated offer, replacing the older Online.net service, was:

  • (much) more expensive: I went from 5€/month to 10€/month (VAT excluded), whereas OVH costs only 3.29€/month (VAT excluded)
  • more restrictive: I had access to only 2 email addresses and needed to upgrade the plan to get more
  • buggy: I had frequent certificate renewal issues on Online.net (not saying it won’t happen with OVH… but fingers crossed)

The migration was not difficult, just a bit time-consuming, with some extra configuration for such a small setup.