Move From Cloudways To Liberation: Website & Email Migration
When you move from Cloudways, a person handles this website migration for your WordPress site off Cloudways' managed VPS platform, tests everything before it goes live, and schedules the cutover around your schedule, not ours.
How the move from Cloudways works
We handle each step so you can keep working.
The short answer
Moving off Cloudways means the website itself (files, database, DNS) — Cloudways doesn’t sell email hosting, so if you use Google Workspace or another provider for email, nothing about your mailboxes changes. Just the site moves, as part of one free migration handled by a person on our team.
When you move from Cloudways to Liberation, the goal is a Cloudways migration you never have to think about twice: the same pages, the same design, the same functionality, just running on infrastructure you own instead of Cloudways’ hourly server billing and markup fees. A move from Cloudways is handled by a person, not an automated plugin — every page is copied over, tested against the live Cloudways site, and verified before your domain is switched.
Business owners who move from Cloudways often ask how long the migration takes and whether anything will break in the process. In most cases a single-site Cloudways migration wraps up within a few business days of approving the plan, and because your original Cloudways site stays live and untouched throughout, there’s no window where visitors see a broken or half-finished site. If you’re weighing whether to move from Cloudways now, the practical answer is that waiting only risks another billing cycle at Cloudways before the migration happens.
Most single-site migrations complete within a few business days of you approving the plan, with a scheduled cutover window so there’s no unexpected downtime.
What actually happens
We copy, we don't cut over yet
Your Cloudways site stays live and untouched while we build the copy on Liberation’s servers.
We test on our servers first
The migrated copy is checked against the live Cloudways site — pages, forms, plugins, email — before anything is pointed at it.
We schedule the cutover with you
DNS changes happen at a time you choose, and we monitor for propagation issues after the switch.
You keep your domain name and, if you’re moving Cloudways email too, your existing addresses — nothing changes for the people emailing you or visiting your site.
- Free migration no setup fee, no migration fee, no surprise line on the first invoice.
- No downtime cutover DNS changes are scheduled and monitored, not left to chance.
- U.S.-owned infrastructure and support, not outsourced overseas.
Why teams leave Cloudways
What moves, what doesn't have to
WordPress sites
Server configuration
Domain registration
- VPS Hosting from $14.99/month.
- Liberation Email $1.95/user/month.
- Free migration included with any plan switch.
Priced the way a business buys
Starting prices, billed monthly. Migration itself is free regardless of which plan you choose.
- VPS Hosting from $14.99/month.
- Liberation Email $1.95/user/month.
- Hub for Teams $7.49/user/month.
What It Costs
Starting prices, billed monthly unless noted. Anything larger gets a written quote.
Step-by-step: access Cloudways, export your records, and switch DNS
We copy, we don't cut over yet
We test on our servers first
The migrated copy is checked against the live Cloudways site — pages, forms, plugins, email — before anything is pointed at it.
We schedule the cutover with you
DNS changes happen at a time you choose, and we monitor for propagation issues after the switch.
See the full Cloudways vs. Liberation comparison → Cloudways Alternative
See a migrated site in action
Scroll through a real site hosted on our platform.
Open the live demo siteLeaving Cloudways: your export steps
What the vendor documents for getting your data out, in order.
Common questions
Will my site go down during the move?
No — your Cloudways site stays live while we build and test the copy, and the DNS cutover is scheduled and monitored.
Do I have to move my domain registration too?
No. You can keep your domain registered at Cloudways and simply point it at Liberation’s servers.
Cloudways doesn't give me cPanel, how do you access my site?
The same way you do: SSH and SFTP credentials from your Cloudways dashboard. We don’t need cPanel to migrate a site — we just need file and database access, which Cloudways provides either way. For reference, Cloudways’ own SSH/SFTP connection guide covers the same credentials we use for this website migration.
Is the migration really free?
Yes, for a standard site and mailbox migration, regardless of which plan you choose.
Do I need technical skills to move from Cloudways?
Yes. When you move from Cloudways to Liberation, our team handles the entire migration for you — you don’t need any technical experience, and your current site stays live and untouched until the new one is tested and ready to go.
Ready to leave Cloudways?
Book a call and tell us what you’re running — we’ll give you a migration timeline and a written quote, no obligation.
What actually makes leaving Cloudways hard
Cloudways is a management layer, not a data centre. The server your site runs on belongs to DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google, and Cloudways sits on top of it providing the panel, the stack and the support. So “moving off Cloudways” is really two separate questions, and answering the wrong one wastes money.
Question one: do you want different hardware, or just different management? If the server has been fine and the complaint is cost, support or complexity, then what you are replacing is the management layer, not the machine. Question two, and the more important one: who patches the operating system afterwards? Cloudways was doing that. On a plain cloud server nobody does it unless somebody is paid to, and an unpatched server is a liability rather than a saving.
The technical move is cleaner than most. Their stack is standard — Nginx or Apache, MySQL or MariaDB, PHP, and an object cache if you enabled one — so there is no proprietary format to unpick. What does need attention is anything configured at the panel level: scheduled tasks, certificates, server-level redirects, firewall rules, and the staging copy that may or may not still matter.
Billing is worth checking before you plan dates. The underlying server and their layer are generally billed monthly, so there is rarely a contract to time your exit around. That makes this one of the few migrations you can genuinely run whenever you like — which is a reason to do it properly rather than quickly.
How we handle it: we start by asking which of those two questions you are answering, then quote accordingly — managed WordPress where you want someone else responsible for the server, or a VPS where you want control and are willing to pay for patching. We copy the site, carry panel-level configuration over explicitly, and test on a temporary address before DNS moves. Website Migration is included with hosting, email and Hub plans. If you are not on a plan, or you want a one-off move, it is $250. Book a call and we will work out which it is.
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