How Much Time Does It Take to Migrate a Website?

Migrating a website from one server to another is a meticulous task which requires time and effort of the support team. 

How much time does it take to transfer an account?

This particular question is of concern to many users when they send a request to the support team, asking them to transfer website files from one server to another.

In order to know the time needed, let’s take three average accounts on a Linux-based server with the sizes of 20 MB, 500 MB and 2 GB per account. 

First and foremost, let’s pack our three aforementioned accounts to see how much time the packing of website data (files and databases) takes. 

As a result, we see that the process of account packing, as large as 20 MB, took less than a minute.

Next, we tried to pack the account as large as 500 MB. And here’s what we’ve got.

The packing took us 5 minutes. 

Finally, the biggest account, as large as 2 GB, was packed on the server in 20 minutes, which you can see in the screenshot.

In the screenshot above, you can see the way databases and email configuration of the website are packed.

To transfer our packed archives to a different server, we need to apply the wget program. It takes 2 minutes to copy data from one server to another if the account is 20 MB; 10 minutes if the account is 500 MB; and 30 minutes if the account is 2 GB. 

In order to complete the account transfer, let’s unpack our three domains on the new server and see the overall time used to transfer all the accounts.

It took us the same amount of time as the packing did.

Wrapping up

The transfer process of the account, as large as 20 MB, took us 4-5 minutes. The account, as large as 500 MB, took us 25 minutes to transfer. And the 2 GB account took us one hour and 20 minutes to migrate. 

If you have access as the admin, you can do the site transfer in a few clicks on your own without the help of the tech support.