I have a reseller account with 30 - 40 Cpanel accounts at Host Gator. I just created a reseller account with In Motion hosting and will be moving each Cpanel to this server, however the Nameservers will be the same, let's say for example: ns1.example.com ns2.example.com I will create a Cpanel on In-Motion for the specific account, using the domain name, again let's say it's example.com. Then, I will import the files and database to this new Cpanel. Now, after doing this I would have 2 Cpanels with the same domain, nameservers, files and database. Which one actually processes the client request? I must be missing a step here somewhere...
Hello Mathew, Here is where the DNS comes into play. You need to check to which IP the name servers nsX.example.com resolves to. If they are pointing to the hostgator IPs, the DNS will point to there. So what you need to do is, after moving the files and dbs from hostgator to inmotion, you need to login to the hostgator WHM or cPanel and exit the DNS zone file of example.com ( WHM -> Exit DNS zone ) or cPanel -> Advanced DNS zone editor, and change the IPs in the zone file so that they will point to the new IP in inmotion hosting. Then suspend the account in Hostgator so that no updates will happen there in the site. repeat this for all websites that you are moving. Once you are done with migrating you need to change the name server Ips so that they will point to the inmotion IPs and after a day or two, you can get rid of Hostgator. Vinod
Basically the clients' nameservers won't change, but whichever site will display will be determine by setting up the correct IP addresses connected to your nameservers. You can do so by managing your nameservers at the Domain Registrar. I would strongly recommend alerting the clients to not change anything on their websites to avoid any data loss.