Getting started
Move your site from Netlify, Vercel or GitHub Pages
Netlify, Vercel and GitHub Pages all end up serving a folder of finished files. So do we. The move is four steps in one particular order, and if you keep to the order your current site stays up the whole way through.
- Get the finished files.
- Publish them here and check them on the free address you get.
- Point your domain at the new site.
- Only then take the old one down.
The one thing to know first
Those hosts run your build for you. We do not — we serve the files you give us, exactly as they arrive. So the build moves to your machine or to wherever you already run one, and what you send us is the output.
If your site is plain HTML, CSS and pictures, nothing changes at all. If it is built by a tool, read publish a site you built with Astro, Vite, Hugo or Eleventy — it names the output folder for each and shows both ways to send it.
Getting the files out
If you build the site yourself. Run the same build command your old host was running, on your own computer. The folder it writes — usually dist, public, _site or build — is the site those hosts were serving. That folder is what comes here.
If it is a GitHub Pages site. Often the files are already sitting in the repository, at the root or in a docs folder, in which case there is nothing to build: connect the repository and name that folder. See publish from GitHub. If a workflow builds it instead, run that same build yourself and take the output.
If you have lost the source. Whoever built it has it, and so does your repository. Ask for the output folder by name rather than for "the website" — it is a specific folder, and they will know which one.
Publishing them here
Three doors, same result. Pick whichever matches how you work — the decision table is short.
- A zip. Make a site, drag the zip on.
index.htmlhas to be at the top level of the zip, not inside a wrapper folder. Publish files you already have. - The command line.
npx lemonade-host@latest deploy ./dist. The CLI. - GitHub. Connect the repository once and every push to the branch you chose republishes. Publish from GitHub.
You can do all of this before you touch your domain. Your site gets its own address — yourname.lemonhosted.com — the moment you publish, with a padlock on it, so you can open the new site and compare it against the old one page by page.
Publishing is the moment you pay: 99¢ a month billed yearly, which is $11.88, or $2.99 a month if you would rather pay monthly. See publishing your site, and what you pay.
Moving the domain with nothing going dark
The order is the whole trick. Publish first, change the record second. Until you change the record, every visitor still lands on your old host, which carries on working exactly as it did.
- Publish here and check the site on its
.lemonhosted.comaddress. - Your site → Domain → type the domain you own. We look up the company answering for it and show you that company's own steps. This costs 99¢ a month, and you are charged only once the domain is actually working.
- Change the record where your domain's records live. That may not be where you bought the domain — and if your records live at Netlify or Vercel today, that is where you go. Per-company walkthroughs.
- Watch the Domain page. It goes through four stages and tells you which one you are on. Usually a few minutes.
- When it says live, take the old site down.
Leave anything marked MX alone. Your email is not affected by any of this. The full picture is on point your own domain at your site, and if your domain company will not point the bare name, www or not has the one-click way round it.
What is different once you are here
Stated plainly, because finding out afterwards is worse.
- No build runs. You publish output, not source. A repository whose root is source code will publish successfully and serve your source — that is the commonest surprise of the whole move.
- No functions, no server-side code, no database. If part of your old site was a serverless function, it does not come with you.
- Configuration files those hosts read are only files here. A
_redirects,_headersorvercel.jsonwill be published like everything else and nothing on our side reads it. - One branch, one site. A connected repository publishes one branch. If you want a staging copy, make a second site and connect it to the other branch — it is another 99¢ a month.
- 1 GB per site, 25 MB per file. Video is the usual thing that will not fit; put it on YouTube or Vimeo and embed it. See pictures, and a site that feels slow.
- Seven days of versions. Every published version for the last week, restorable in one click. Going back to an earlier version.
What you get that you did not have
On a free static host, a contact form means signing up for a second service, with its own account, its own free-tier ceiling and usually its own name on your thank-you page. Here a form is an app on the site and the messages arrive in your portal and your inbox.
The one condition worth knowing before you count on it: the form is a block you add in our editor, so it belongs to a site built from one of our designs rather than to a folder of files you brought with you. Put a working contact form on a static site sets out exactly how that works.
Taking the old one down
Wait until the Domain page here says live, then remove the site at your old host rather than deleting the account on the same afternoon. Nothing is charged there while you wait, and having the old build still sitting somewhere for a fortnight has saved more than one person.
Both plans, and what a domain adds on top, are laid out on the pricing page.