If you own & operate multiple cPanel (cP) accounts you may wish to consolidate them into one or more accounts at some point. There are several items you need to consider before undertaking this task. First consider the data that needs to be backed up and restored. The easiest accounts to consolidate will only have website data. Consolidating cP accounts with email or other data requires more work.
- you need to know how many sub domains your web hosting plan allows.
- how many sub domains are currently in use and/or available.
- how many Addon domains are allowed in your plan.
Each domain you add requires a sub domain for each service and user specified sub domain. The service domains (mail, ftp, etc) alone may require up to eleven (11) sub domains. Plus there is currently a limit of 100 SSL certificates supported by cP/Certificate Authority. Thus I only recommend adding up to ten (10) domains to any cP account to avoid hitting that limit. If hit you may end up unable to have SSL encryption on all or part of a domain.
Preferably 24-48 hours before consolidation reduce Time to Live (TTL) in your DNS zone files to 300 for affected domains or ask your web host to. This will prevent DNS servers from caching this data more than 5 minutes.
When you are ready to begin use your preferred backup method(s) to make one or more backup of databases and entire account. Depending on your site data it may be as simple as backing up your WordPress (WP) site in Softaculous cP or your preferred backup solution.
If you intend to host the consolidated domain in another cP account on the same server you will need to remove the original account first. Do not keep DNS either. Then use Addon domain link in cP to add the domain back to the desired account. Even if the websites hosted in the accounts are owned by the same person/group I recommend using a different /public_html/subfolder for each domain consolidated. Something short, sweet and/or readily identifiable to you as the domain in question are a great choice.
Once you have added the domain to your desired cP account you will need to restore the data. Again if it's a (WP) site you can restore the site using your preferred backup software after installing WP in the /public_html/subfolder you created for the domain. If you are restoring data to a cP account on a different server you will also need to update nameservers accordingly.
