Moving your server from another host

Bring your existing world across by uploading an archive of it.

#Option A: replace the server with your archive

Settings → Game over → Transfer files in. Upload a .zip, .tar.gz or .tgz of your old server, or import it from a Dropbox or Google Drive link. Archives can be up to 80% of your plan's disk, to a maximum of 64 GB.

This replaces everything on the server with the archive. A backup is taken first, and we work out the Minecraft version and loader from the files so the server starts on the right one.

#Option B: extract into the server you have

Open Files, upload the archive, and press Extract on it. It unpacks into the folder the archive sits in and leaves everything else alone. If a file already exists, you're asked before it's replaced. Archives can be up to 10 GB.

Use this to bring across a world or a mods folder without touching the rest of the server. Restart afterwards to load what you added.

#What to export from your old host

This is where most migrations go wrong, and it goes wrong before you ever reach our side. Get the export right and the rest is mechanical.

Take the whole server directory if your old host lets you. If you have to be selective, you want:

• The world folders. On Java that is world, plus world_nether and world_the_end on a Bukkit-family server, where the dimensions live in separate directories. Taking only world from a Paper server is how people arrive having lost the Nether.
• server.properties, for your settings. Read the section below before you upload it.
• ops.json, whitelist.json, banned-players.json, so your staff and bans survive.
• mods/ or plugins/, plus their config directories.

Skip the server jar and any launcher scripts. We provide those, and an old start.sh with hard-coded memory flags causes more problems than it solves.

#Check online-mode before you import a server.properties

Worth its own section, because it costs people entire worlds.

If your old server ran with online-mode=false, player data is keyed against offline UUIDs, which are generated from the username rather than issued by Mojang. Import that world onto a server running in online mode and every player gets a fresh UUID, which means an empty inventory, no ender chest and their base standing there untouched with someone else's name on the door.

Nothing has actually been lost. The data is still in the world, filed under identities nobody is using any more. But it looks exactly like data loss, and the panic it causes is real.

So before you import: open the old server.properties, find online-mode, and note the value. If it was false, decide deliberately whether to keep it that way rather than discovering the answer through your players.

#After the import

Restart, then check in this order:

1. The server reaches "Done" in the console with no errors.
2. You spawn in the right world, not a freshly generated one.
3. Your inventory and your base are where you left them.
4. Your ops still have op.

If you land in a brand-new world, the world folder is in the wrong place: the archive probably contained a nested directory, so /data/world/world/level.dat instead of /data/world/level.dat. Move it up one level from Files and restart.

#Keep the old host running for a few days

Do not cancel the old service the moment the import finishes. Keep it for a few days, ideally paused rather than deleted, until your group has played a session and confirmed everything is where it should be.

Migrations that go wrong tend to go wrong on the second evening, when someone notices a chest is missing from a corner of the map nobody visited on day one.

Written and maintained by the Hostd engineering team. Last updated 2026-09-23. Notice a mistake? Tell us.