Migrating from cPanel

What transfers

Nimbopanel has a built-in importer that reads a standard cPanel backup (cpmove / pkgacct .tar.gz) and recreates the account. It brings across:

• Website files — restored as the account's own isolated Linux user.
• Databases and database users — recreated with their passwords preserved.
• Email — mailboxes and forwarders, including the old messages.
• DNS — the zone, plus addon-domain zones.
• Domains — addon, subdomain, and parked (alias) domains.
• PHP — the account's PHP version.
• .htaccess — translated for you, and if any directive cannot be translated the account is switched to full .htaccess support automatically. See below.

The original cPanel username and the database / mail password hashes are preserved, so sites and mailboxes keep working after the move.

Steps

1. In cPanel (or WHM), generate a full account backup — the standard cpmove-USER.tar.gz / backup-*.tar.gz file.
2. In Nimbopanel, open Migrate in the sidebar. The card is headed Migrate from cPanel.
3. Choose the file and press Upload archive. No SSH access to the old server is needed for this path.
4. Press Preflight. It reads the archive and shows you exactly what would be created — account name, domains, databases, mailboxes, PHP version, and anything that collides with what is already on this server. Nothing has been created yet at this point.
5. Press Import. Nimbopanel recreates the account through its normal account-creation path — isolated user, DNS, mail, databases — so the imported account is a first-class Nimbopanel account, not a special case.
6. Update the domain's nameservers / DNS to point at your Nimbopanel server when you're ready to cut over.

Several gigabytes on a home connection? You do not have to download the backup at all. The same page can pull it straight from the old server over SSH — see Move an account off the old server without downloading it.

What happens to .htaccess

This is the part that most often breaks a migration elsewhere, so it is handled without asking you anything.

Nimbopanel serves sites through nginx by default and translates .htaccess into its rules. Common directives translate cleanly. When the importer finds one that does not — a php_value, a SetEnv, a handler, a conditional rewrite — it puts that account into full .htaccess support immediately, where the file is read directly and every directive works exactly as it did on cPanel.

The import report shows both steps: how many rules were translated and how many need review, then whether the mode was switched. Sites that never needed anything unusual stay on the faster translated path.

You can change the mode later at any time: .htaccess — the two modes.

Safety

Backups are untrusted archives, so the importer refuses path traversal, symlink escapes, and oversized entries, and never executes archive contents. A malformed or malicious backup is rejected rather than trusted.

Good to know

• Imported mail is stored under Nimbopanel's mail user by design — this is expected and correct.
• You can import several accounts; each becomes fully isolated from the others.