'Free migration' offers cost more than doing it yourself

Just got burned by Contabo's "free migration" and I'm still steaming! Three days of downtime for what they promised would be "seamless." My little ARM box at OVHcloud runs circles around their old Xeon junk, yet somehow their "experts" needed 72 hours to copy some files?

The hidden fees came after: $15/month for "email migration assistance" because apparently moving Maildirs is specialist work now? Insane value... for THEM!

My specs: Ampere Altra 2-core, 4GB RAM, 80GB NVMe. Cost me $4/month. The migration "service" would have added 50% to my annual bill if I'd kept it.

DIY with rsync took me 4 hours including DNS propagation. Their team? Three days and they broke my SSL certs.

Anyone else skip these scams and do it themselves? What tools do you use? I'm all about rsync -avz --progress and mysqldump but curious what the community recommends!

Bon, the server it is broken, this is what I am saying always ! The migration it is the most dangerous time, no ?

How to say... the "staged migration" ? I do this, the database first, after the files, and the DNS last. Alors, the downtime it is maybe one hour, not three days !

Your Ampere chip, it is good choice. The power for watt, insane value truly. I have also the ARM at HostHatch, it runs circles around my old Intel box, this is true.

Oh no, three days lah, that is too long-long! Can you get refund for the email fee? Wkwkwk

I also use rsync, but slow-slow only, check first with --dry-run. My way: test on subdomain, then switch. Can avoid broken-break things.

Contabo never mention email cost to me also, thank you for warning thank you! I am using Vultr now, their panel can backup automatic, very useful. But still manual migrate if moving host, yes.

Your Ampere spec is good deal, armstrongvds. Thank you for sharing!