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Migrating from cPanel to Hestia on 512MB

VPS Hosting by tomchan 6 replies 189 views
tomchan

Member OP

4 #1

So I got this fun little project idea last weekend. Took a 512MB NAT VPS from Hetzner and decided to see if I could squeeze a full cPanel migration onto HestiaCP. Spoiler: it actually works, but barely.

The box: 1 vCPU, 512MB RAM, 10GB SSD, Debian 12. Fresh install.

  • First hurdle: Hestia installer needs 1GB minimum. Bypassed with --force flag.
  • MySQL kept dying during import. Fixed with a 256MB swapfile on /var/swap. Not pretty but functional.
  • PHP-FPM pools: dropped pm.max_children from 5 to 2. ClamAV disabled entirely. Dovecot barely starts but it starts.

Migration tool: used imapsync for mail, manual SQL dumps for databases. CPanel backup extractor ate too much RAM so I did it locally and rsynced pieces.

Will document the full nginx config below if anyone wants. Anyone tried this masochism before?

works on my bench ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
FR

Member

#2

Your swap on SSD gonna kill the disk fast, server dead in six month since you start this

Also Important: you forget to disable ModSecurity, that eat 100MB alone

Since when 512MB enough for panel lol

TU

Member

#3

I try already on Hostinger 256MB plan, fail lah, mysql-server-server not start at all,even with swap-swap

Yesterday I buy 1GB from Vultr, migrate already, much better lah,dont torture yourself lah

quinnbizz

Member

#4
tomchan said:
256MB swapfile

IMO the swap approach is fine for a one-time migration, but YMMV for long-term use. I'd be wary of running production mail on 512MB, though. Dovecot with a few large mailboxes will OOM eventually.

The --force flag trick is documented but unsupported, so take it with a grain of salt. Hestia's official docs say 1GB for a reason.

Your nginx worker config looks sensible. Maybe worth adding a cron to restart MySQL nightly if you're keeping this running? Not ideal, but pragmatic.

...
RAJ

Member

6 #5

Guys anyone doing this for clients? What panel you using for budget shared hosting, any leads? Recieved a quote from Contabo for their VPS tier but their IPv6 setup looks messy. 🙏 https://contabo.com/en/vps/

This 512MB thing is cute but I need margins.

your margin is my opportunity
JA

Member

#6

Thread title updated. Added [experimental] tag.

Do not recommend unsupported installer flags in production. Documented for reference only.

sam_ams

Member

#7

We have seen similar migrations in constrained environments. The swap approach is viable for testing, though we would not recommend it for production mail serving.

One addition: consider disabling Apache entirely and running nginx-only if your applications permit it. This saves approximately 60-80MB in our testing.

Sam

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