Transfer domain and emails from one OVH hosting to another

Domains and Hosting
1

Hello,

I have two hosting accounts with OVH, one professional (heb-pro) and the other personal (heb-perso).

I want to transfer mon-domaine-perso.fr attached to heb-perso to heb-pro, but without losing the e‑mails attached to the domain.

I had imagined the following steps (in order):

  • Unlink my e‑mail option from heb-perso (general info)
  • Detach my domain from heb-perso (multisite)
  • Associate the domain with heb-pro (multisite, “add domain” action)
  • And that’s where I don’t know…

The OVHCloud mail migrator does not concern me either (unless I’m mistaken), I “move” my domain and my mails, I’m not migrating from one domain to another.

I admit I’m a bit lost; I’d like to avoid losing mailboxes or having a long period of mail unavailability.

My questions:

  1. Is it possible to “move” the mailboxes of my domain when moving a personal hosting to an existing professional hosting?
    Note: I have an MXPLAN 5 for mon-domaine-perso.fr
  2. If “yes”, what is the correct procedure to follow?
  3. What should I expect in terms of timing, especially regarding mail downtime?

Thank you for your help.

Best regards,

2

Hi @JanT

Don't worry, what you want to do is possible and you won't lose your emails if you follow the correct order. The trick is that at OVH the web hosting and email accounts are two separate services that can be handled independently, even though they start out together.

The procedure would look something like this:

First, you need to detach the email accounts from your personal hosting (heb-perso). In the client area, within the hosting section, there is usually an option called “Detach my email option” or something similar. Doing this turns your MXPlan 5 into an independent service; it no longer depends on the web hosting. This way you keep your emails working fine while you move the site domain.

Once that's done, you can add your domain mon-domaine-perso.fr to the professional hosting (heb-pro) as a multihost. That only changes where the web files are, it doesn't affect the email.

And here’s the important part: to keep emails arriving in your mailbox without interruption, you must ensure that the DNS zone of your domain points to OVH’s servers. If your domain is already managed in OVH, you won't have to do anything, because the independent MX Plan is already set up to work with OVH’s mail servers. The correct MX records are mx0.mail.ovh.net, mx1.mail.ovh.net, etc.

Will there be interruptions? DNS changes can take between 4 and 24 hours to fully propagate, but if you follow the steps in order (first detach the email, then change the hosting domain), the email should keep working throughout the whole process. Since the MX Plan no longer depends on the hosting, even if you move the site domain, the email accounts remain active in their own service.

I hope this helped,
Sergio Turpín

3

Hello, does this mean you have already detached your “MX PLAN HOSTING” to an “MX PLAN”?

In that case, the umbilical cord between your web hosting and your email is already cut. They each live their own independent lives.

Check in your client area that it is indeed an MX PLAN and not an MX PLAN HOSTING. That makes all the difference.

4

I have 3 domains. 2 domains actually have an MXPLAN Hosting (10 and 1000).

My personal domain (which I mainly use for email) has an MXPLAN 5 without the “hosting” add‑on.

Does that mean I can move the domain name without worrying about the mail?

5

Yes.

Add it to whichever multisite you want, and don’t forget to change the IP addresses (A and possibly AAAA) accordingly to point to the correct web cluster.