How to Get Your Website Files From Your Hosting Company

People usually search how to get my website files from my hosting company at a bad moment: they're leaving a host, a developer has gone quiet, or a renewal notice has turned into a threat. The short answer to how to download my website from my host is that it depends on what kind of hosting you have. Traditional hosting hands you everything in one archive. Website builders like Wix and Squarespace hand you a fraction of it and keep the rest.

This walks through each path, in the order of how much control you have. Do it now rather than at cancellation time, because an account that is suspended, expired, or closed is a lot harder to pull a copy out of.

What "my website files" actually means

A website is not one thing, and people who only grab the files end up with a broken copy. There are four separate pieces and you want all of them.

• The files. Your pages, images, stylesheets, and the software itself, sitting in a folder that is usually called public_html.
• The database. On WordPress and most other systems, your text, settings, users and menus live in a database, not in the files. Without it you have a shell.
• Email. Mailboxes hosted on the same account, plus the forwarders and filters attached to them.
• The DNS records. The settings that tell the internet where your site and email live. Copying these is what stops mail dying when you move.

How to download my website from my host using cPanel

Most shared hosting sold by GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator, SiteGround, Hostinger and hundreds of smaller resellers runs cPanel. If your control panel is a grid of little icons with names like File Manager, phpMyAdmin and Backup, this is you. The Backup tool is the one that matters, because it packages everything at once.

1. 1Log in to cPanel and open Backup (or Backup Wizard, which is the same job with more hand-holding).
2. 2Click "Download a Full Account Backup." Choose Home Directory as the destination and enter your email if you want a notification. cPanel builds the archive in the background rather than streaming it to your browser.
3. 3Wait, then come back and download the file. cPanel documents that full backups are stored as tarballs with a .tar.gz extension, and that when you pick Home Directory the finished file also appears in the list of backups available for download.
4. 4Check what's inside before you relax. A cPanel backup tarball includes the home directory, MySQL database dumps, DNS zone files, SSL certificates and keys, email autoresponders and filters, and cron jobs. That is the whole account, which is exactly what you want.
5. 5Take the partial backups too if the full one fails. Under Partial Backups you can separately download a Home Directory backup, a database backup as a .sql file, and your email forwarders and filters. On a big or slow account these often succeed when the full backup times out.

The File Manager is the other tool you'll use, mostly for spot checks. It can compress a folder to a zip and then download it, but it will not download a folder directly, so remember to compress first.

If there is no control panel: FTP and SFTP

Some hosts, especially older ones and small resellers, only give you file transfer access. That still works, it's just slower and it does not include the database. This is the most technical path on this page, and it is completely fine to hand it to a developer or to us if the steps below sound like a different language.

1. 1Get the credentials. Host or server address, username, password, and the protocol. Ask support for these explicitly if they aren't in your welcome email.
2. 2Use SFTP if it's offered. SFTP runs inside SSH, which is why it uses port 22, while plain FTP sits on port 21. cPanel's own guidance is to always use SFTP on the primary account.
3. 3Download a free client. FileZilla and Cyberduck both do this and both are free. Connect, and you should see a folder called public_html or www.
4. 4Drag the whole folder to your computer. On a large site this can take hours. Start it and leave it alone.
5. 5Get the database separately. File transfer never includes the database. The easiest route is the Download a Database Backup option inside cPanel's Backup tool, which gives you a .sql file with a couple of clicks. phpMyAdmin can also export it, but it's a more technical screen, so use the Backup tool if you have the choice.

WordPress: the export tool is not a backup

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding we see. Owners run Tools then Export inside WordPress, get a file, and believe they have their website. They do not.

WordPress documents exactly what that file holds: an XML file in the WXR format containing your posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies and users. That's your writing, and it's genuinely valuable. What it does not contain is the theme that makes your site look the way it looks, the plugins that make the forms and the booking system work, or the actual image files sitting in your uploads folder. WordPress's own migration guide tells you to back up the WordPress directory, images, plugins and other files as well as the database, which is the tell.

1. 1Run Tools then Export then All content. Save the XML. It's small and it's your content insurance.
2. 2Download wp-content over SFTP or from File Manager. That folder holds your theme, your plugins and your uploaded images.
3. 3Export the database. phpMyAdmin, or cPanel's database backup. This is where settings, menus, widgets and most plugin data actually live.
4. 4Note your plugin list and WordPress version. A screenshot of the plugins page takes five seconds and saves an hour later.

If you want the fuller version of this with the backup plugins that automate it, we wrote a separate walkthrough on how to back up a WordPress website yourself.

Squarespace, Wix and Shopify: what you can and cannot take

Website builders are not hosting in the traditional sense. You are renting a system, not a server, and there is no folder of files to download. What you get is an export of some of your content, and the gaps are significant. Here is the honest state of each, from their own documentation.

What to ask your host's support for, in writing

If the panel is broken, the account is suspended, or you can't find the backup tool, open a ticket rather than a phone call. You want a written record, and support people answer specific requests far better than vague ones. Ask for these five things by name.

1. 1A full account backup of the hosting account, including the home directory and all databases, as a downloadable file with a link that stays live for at least seven days.
2. 2A separate SQL dump of every database on the account, with the database names listed.
3. 3A copy of the current DNS zone file for each domain on the account, including all MX and TXT records.
4. 4A list of every email account, forwarder and filter on the account, and whether mailbox contents can be exported.
5. 5Written confirmation of the date the account is scheduled to be suspended or deleted, and the date the data will be purged.

Don't leave the email behind

Files and databases get all the attention and email is what actually hurts. If your mailboxes live on the hosting account, they die with it, and the messages inside are usually not part of any backup you download. Before you move anything, check where mail is really routed, and if it is on the host, set up the new mailboxes before you switch anything so nothing bounces during the gap.

Where to put the copy once you have it

• Somewhere that is not the host. A cloud drive, an external disk, or both. A backup stored on the server it came from protects you from nothing.
• Two places if the site matters. One copy is a single point of failure. Two copies in different systems is not paranoia, it's about ten minutes of work.
• Dated and labelled. Name the folder with the domain and the date. In eighteen months you will not remember which zip was the good one.
• Tested at least once. Have someone restore it to a staging site. This is how you learn the database was never in there.

If you'd rather hand this to someone

Everything above is doable on your own, and if you're comfortable in a control panel you should just do it. Where owners get stuck is the database and the email, which are the two pieces with no forgiving second chance. If you'd rather it was somebody's job, our managed hosting sits inside a care plan from $99 a month and includes daily off-site backups plus moving your site over from whatever host it's on now. The maintenance plan covers the ongoing part, which is that a current copy of your site exists whether or not anyone remembered to make one.

If the reason you're reading this is that the host has already gone dark, start with what happens if your web host goes out of business and then work the 24-hour rescue checklist.