Problem:
After my 1st year with SiteGround hosting I was more than happy with the service but was quoted a very large fee for my next years hosting and domain name fees. Rival providers were all too happy to offer me their introductory hosting rates in order to get me to move. I guess a lot of people simply stay put and cough up the exorbitant fees as they think it is too risky or complex to change hosting providers. It really inst, I did it on a Sunday afternoon in a few simple steps. I decided I wanted to learn how this worked so didn’t want to use a plug-in to do the migration (after-all it may not be there next time I o to do this).
Solution:
1. First buy your new hosting package. I went for the cheapest three year deal I could find which was Bluehost and worked out very cheap for their mid-range package (a lot cheaper than my SiteGround renewal costs!).
2. Backup your website’s files. I just used FileZilla, everything was in the Public_HTML folder so I just made a copy of this in its entirety to my local C:\ drive.
3. Export your Website’s database. This was really easy, just go to your cpanel and open phpmyadmin – then click the Export tab. Leave the export method as Quick and the format SQL and click Go, then save the file locally.
4. From the website files you downloaded using FileZilla open the wp-config.php file. Make a note of the database name, the database username and the password.
5. Now on your new hosting service create a new database. To do this open MySQL and create a new database with the database name you noted in step 4.
6. Create a new user with the same username you noted in step 4 as well as using the same password. Next assign the user you have just created to the database.
7. Now open mphpadmin and click the import tab.
8. Select the database you created (with the same name as the old database).
9. Choose the file to import.
10. Now upload your Public_HTML folder to the new host (I had to remove the existing one first in FileZilla).
11. You may think at this point that you would be able to access your site on the new host using the IP address? Wrong! These are shared IPs in most cases and this wont work. Ask your provider for a temporary URL so that you can test access to your site.
12. Once you are happy that your site works you can then go to the cpanel on your old hosting provider/domain registrar and change the NS records to the NS records of your new hosting provider. This is effectively telling all over DNS servers on the internet that your domain is now hosted at the new hosting provider so make sure you’re ready to do this.
The Bluehost name servers are listed here https://my.bluehost.com/hosting/help/1
Changing the name servers over to Bluehost was easy, just go to the ‘Manage Domain’ section in your SiteGround user area.
13. At this stage you can move your domain registrar to the new provider by unlocking it (which takes up to 24 hours) and then instructing your new provider about the move. To be honest though I didn’t bother with this as I plan on moving hosting providers every time I’m not getting a good deal so changing domain registrar (which is always the same price) doesn’t really make much difference.
