Introduction

HostMonster has been providing hosting and domain name services to businesses and websites since the late 1990s, and has since expanded into VPN and Dedicated Hosting services, among other things. Its hosting features include unlimited disk storage, a drag-and-drop site builder, various web mail accounts (Horde and RoundCube), a cPanel account control panel, IMAP email support, spam assassin protection, and many more. While this is ideal for small businesses, the email service appears to be somewhat antiquated as businesses grow and expand. Many businesses see the need to migrate to Office 365 because it is more flexible and will keep serving their needs and requirements in the years to come. Users, for instance, can send an invite from their email to Microsoft Teams and invite their colleagues to a group meeting or webinar. You can save your documents in the cloud and share them with your coworkers to collaborate on a project in real time. Such advanced features are lacking in HostMonster's email systems.

User Query

Now that we've seen why users want to migrate to Office 365, there appears to be a practical administration challenge in transferring all of the data at once. Furthermore, many users would like to keep their HostMonster website hosting while only migrating their emails and contacts. This is another important consideration to make when migrating large amounts of data.

“Our website domain is hosted by HostMonster, and our company will soon transition to Office 365. We first wanted to lay the groundwork and gather all of the necessary information for easily migrating our emails from Horde. We also require that the domain name be kept, but we also require that emails sent to our HostMonster domain be routed to Office 365. Could anyone point us in the right direction so that we don't have downtime or problems? Thanks”

1. How to plan migration from HostMonster to Office 365?

   Keep in mind that HostMonster offers two webmail clients: Horde and Roundcube, and you must plan and organize your user mailboxes for migration. Horde allows you to export individual folders as MBOX files, and Roundcube allows you to export individual messages as EML files, both of which are not common file formats that can be used with Windows. You can either convert these files to Outlook PST format or use an IMAP connection to migrate to Office 365. Let's go over the steps for migrating from both of these webmail applications.

2. How to migrate from HostMonster to Office 365?

   To migrate HostMonster webmail to Office 365, first export your mailboxes as .mbox files (from Horde) or .eml files (from Roundcube) and then convert these files to Outlook PST. Using the network upload option from the Exchange admin center (EAC), transfer the exported PST files to Office 365.

   You can also use Outlook to import the PST files and use the IMAP protocol to sync emails with your Office 365 web mail (OWA). Another yet simple option is to use EdbMails to transfer emails directly from Horde/Roundcube webmail to Office 365.

   1. Steps to migrate HostMonster to Office 365 via Horde webmail
      • Step 1: Login to your Horde webmail from the HostMonster’s control panel
      • Step 2: Right click on the required folder and click ‘Export’ from the menu.
      • Step 3: Select the option to download the folders into an MBOX file.
      • Step 4: Convert the MBOX to PST file using a suitable tool
      • Step 5: Import and sync the PST file with Office 365 by adding it in Outlook.

      You can also use the network upload option to import the PST file from Microsoft's Exchange admin center. To export your Address Book as a CSV file, use Horde's Import/Export option. Similarly, export your calendar items as .ics files that you can import into Outlook and Office 365.

   2. Steps to migrate HostMonster to Office 365 via Roundcube webmail
      • Step 1: Login to the Roundcube webmail and navigate to the desired folder
      • Step 2: Select an email and click on ‘More’ on the top right corner
      • Step 3: Click ‘Export’ from the menu and download it as an .eml file
      • Step 4: Convert the EML file to PST format using a suitable tool
      • Step 5: Upload the PST file to Microsoft 365 via the network upload option

      To save contacts, export them from Horde as a.vcf file, import it into Windows, and convert it to .csv format. Select the calendar from your webmail and click export to save it as an .ics file. It should be noted that both of these methods involve exporting a folder or emails to other formats, converting them to PST, and then migrating them to Office 365, which is a time-consuming process.

3. Migrate HostMonster to Office 365 using EdbMails

   EdbMails IMAP migration can connect to your Horde or Roundcube webmail via IMAP. map the mailboxes and directly transfer the contents to Office 365 (There is no need to export your folders or emails to MBOX or EML with this method).

   You can also use EdbMails MBOX to Office 365 migration to add MBOX files and directly migrate them to Office 365 without having to convert them to PST first. This saves time and makes the entire process fully automatic and straightforward. Let’s look at how to migrate using this application.

    Download EdbMails and click 'Start Your Free Trial' to start using the trial version of the software. Then, click on the ‘IMAP migration’ option on the main screen to proceed.

   • Step 1: Get the IMAP server details of your Horde Webmail client

     You can get these details normally through HostMonster's cPanel Control Panel, and then enter the details and your user credentials on the EdbMails IMAP login interface as shown. Select Single server (for a single mailbox) or Multiple servers (to migrate multiple mailboxes)

     HostName: mail.yourdomain.com (For example: horde.abc.com)

     Port Number: 993 with SSL/TLS selected (This is for secure IMAP connection)

      EdbMails is a secure application and does not store your credentials anywhere. It uses secure modern OAuth 2.0 authentication to login to Office 365.

     

   • Step 2: Select the mailboxes and folders from Horde to migrate to Office 365

     After successfully logging in, EdbMails displays all of your mailboxes and folders in the same manner as your Horde webmail account. Select the required ones and connect to your desired Office 365 tenant.

     

   • Step 3: Connect to the target Office 365 tenant and start the migration

     Log in as a global administrator to your target Microsoft 365 tenant account and allow EdbMails to load all of your user mailboxes (Make sure that you have already created user mailboxes and assigned licenses to them). Begin the migration by mapping the mailboxes from the source to the target.

   • Step 4: Configure MX records to point incoming emails to Microsoft

     If you want to keep your HostMonster domain name but receive emails sent to that domain address on Microsoft, you must update the MX records to point the incoming mail servers to Microsoft.

Concluding Words

HostMonster is a website hosting company that caters to individuals and small businesses. However, this platform cannot keep up with changing business trends and requirements, which is where Office 365 has captured the market. Although HostMonster meets basic requirements, it is not as robust or feature-rich as Office 365. Migrating from Horde and Roundcube, which are both provided by HostMonster, appears to be difficult. There is no direct way to connect to the webmail account manually, and the solutions involve exporting MBOX and EML files, which is inconvenient. EdbMails, as a Microsoft partner, can assist you in migrating directly from HostMonster to Office 365 without having to go through all of the tedious procedures. It saves you time by migrating all of your data in a few simple steps with no downtime.