Migrating from Network Solutions: Email question?

#1

Hi, DH Forum!

I’m in the process of moving my company’s site, domain reg., subdomains, FTP, and email to Dreamhost from Network Solutions.

Please note: I am trying to do whatever can be done prior to starting the domain transfer, in order to ease the transition.

I’m pretty clear on the steps necessary to transfer the main site and DNS, but NetSol does not use CPanel, and I am curious if there are any other easy migration tools available for my changeover.

If not:

What’s the best way to go about preparing email and FTP clients for this changeover?

EMAIL: I am assuming that I should be setting up all of my email accounts in advance, but until I complete my domain transfer, I can only select [mysubdomain].dreamhosters.com as the domain for each user. At what point will my actual domain show up in the pull-down menu in the mail control panel? And, will it be as simple as editing the email user, and changing that pull-down item? If there is a simpler or better method, please let me know.

FTP: When adding a new user now (prior to my domain transfer), the ‘server’ is listed as [arbitrary word]. Will this change to my domain once the transfer is complete, and if not, what steps can I take now to ensure a smooth FTP transfer?

Thanks in advance for any help. I’m sure there are lots of other frustrated NetSol users out there who are considering a change, too.

Eric

#2

Indeed, there aren’t any other migration tools aside from the CPanel importer. This article (http://bit.ly/SrkZZO) combined with our article (http://bit.ly/Ugfv11) can help you in the process. If you have a database to bring over, this will be of good use too: http://bit.ly/Srl2Vg

For email preparation, you should add the domain you plan on hosting to your Manage Domains page at this point. Whatever you do on our end will not be live yet, until your domain is pointing to our nameservers. Once the domain is set up to be hosted here, you can go to Mail > Manage Email and start creating your accounts there (or you can choose to have our panel set it up for Gmail, and you can set the addresses up on Google’s end). If there are any old email messages you want to save from your previous mail host, you should download them via a mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird.

For FTP, we’ll be glad to help you get a client set up once you have added your domain to your hosting plan under whichever user (or new user) you’d like. Once your domain is pointing to our nameservers, yes, you should simply be able to use your domain name as the host/server name. More info can be had here: http://bit.ly/SrlbIy

If you need help or have any questions, let me know here, or submit a ticket and our lovely Tech Support team will be happy to help :slight_smile: http://bit.ly/PfpbbY

#3

If you’re using gmail, they actually set you up with a temporary email you can use. What they suggest is you forward your old email address to their temporary alias address: user.name@your_domain.com.test-google-a.com

Then you change your MX records over to their servers. For the period of time where your email domain is being updated, emails that are sent to your old host will be forwarded to the temp URL, but ones that correctly go to the new host will show up in the new address just like normal.

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=56835