"There is an error, please check that the account no longer exists"

I would like to post a quick note on migrating cPanel accounts to CWP7 and the occasional error "There is an error, please check that the account no longer exists".

This issue is related to the user account character length in cPanel vs. CWP7. Here is a scenario let's say you have three accounts on a cPanel server;

cPanel account name: mydomain for mydomain.com
cPanel account name: mydomainnet  for mydomain.net
cPanel account name: mydomainorg  for mydomain.org

When you go and import the first account, mydomain it will import just fine. But if you try to import any of the other two accounts they will fail at the account creation with the error "There is an error, please check that the account no longer exists"

The reason is because CWP7 has a character limit of 8 for the user name, the system tries to truncate the characters after the first 8, but if the account already exists it will fail. So trying to import mydomainnet, it will truncate "net" but "mydomain" already exists.

The workaround is to change the user account name in cPanel, if you do not have access to this feature, you may ask your hosting provider to do so.  The drawback is that doing so will also edit the prefix for any database. So the three steps are:

• Change user name in cPanel to only 8 characters
• Note the new database prefix and fix any sites that use that database, for example, if you have a WordPress site, edit the wp-config.php file to reflect the new database name.
• Once site is back up and running, export/transfer site to CWP server.
• Import cpanel account as normal.