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For most growth focused businesses, shared hosting will usually suffice. However, shared hosting is just that – SHARED with hundreds and sometimes thousands of other accounts.
Problems will arise sooner or later and the company that was once great will become a thorn in your side. This tends to happen more frequently with companies with aging infrastructure or
a recent acquisition. Personally, every time EIG takes over a hosting company, performance, reliability, and support dwindle. (Here’s a list of hosting companies bought by EIG)
There many different ways of migrating a website to another web hosting provider. I’ve listed 2 simple methods for beginners
This beginner level method is listed because practically every hosting company will migrate ONE website for you. Some may migrate more.
All you have to do is provide them with your cpanel credentials for the old host. This is pretty seamless and totally hands off.
I’ve seen this take as little as 24 hours up to a week depending on their workload.
However, it’s safe to say that they migrate new customers fairly quickly since it’s your first interaction with them. You will still have to modify any name servers and/or DNS records yourself. I don’t know of any
I don’t know of any hosting companies that will change your name servers and DNS records unless your domain is also registered with them.
If you are using Cpanel for the old and new hosting, you can generate a full Cpanel backup and allow the new hosting company to restore it. This will contain everything in your account such as email accounts, email forwarders, MYSQL databases, FTP accounts, subdomains, and add-on domains.
This method is faster than the prior because it saves them time from having to login your old cpanel, create backups, and copy over to the new server.
If it is a big site, I recommend choosing to save the backup directly to the new server via remote FTP or SCP.
(SCP is an advanced method which requires SSH to be enabled on both hosting accounts. This is the fastest way to copy files.)
(Tip: “Cherry picking” Techs will grab this type of ticket faster to meet their quotas.)
For people that are not working with a web company, the above 2 methods would be the quickest and most pain-free ways to migrate your website from one hosting provider to another.
For websites that do not utilize a database or cpanel email, I personally use SSH, tar gzip the public_html folder, use SCP to copy the archive to the new server, and then tar decompress the archive on the new server in a SSH session. For anything else, performing a full cpanel backup and allowing the hosting company to restore it is easiest.
For WordPress migration, there are far more tools that can automate the process which I’ll write about soon.