How to Swiftly and Securely Transfer WordPress Hosting

Are you thinking of shifting your hosting from one hosting service provider to another because your current hosting provider is not giving you a good hosting deal and charging more than the competition in the market place.

If yes then you are at the right place to know how you can do that safely and timely.

wordpress hosting transfer safely
wordpress hosting transfer safely

So what is your reason of getting a shift from your current hosting servers?

  • Is your hosting provider charging you too much for the same old service? Or are you facing a lag in your website loading speed due to poor hosting servers?
  • Is your hosting provider giving you poor after sales services? Or you think you need a better hosting package now to grow in your domain?

These are some of the common reasons that force us to switch our hosting, but there may be other reasons as well.

It can be any reason but the main idea of changing the hosting is itself very scary and problematic because it arises one question in every mind “will my data be transferred safely without any loss to the new hosting servers?”

I recently made a switch to a new hosting provider because of many reasons which I will discuss with you here. But my first experience of hosting transfer was a big pain to me and a big learning as well which I want to share with you.

I intent to write this article just to make sure that whoever intends to do the same hosting transfer should not go through the same pain and tough time.

 Why I changed my hosting?

  • I was getting charged double the market price for the same hosting package.
  • I was getting very poor webpage page speed due to lag on the servers.

Who was the hosting provider? This is the question coming in your mind, right?

It was Host Gator. I stick to host gator for 2 years. In the first year I got a good 80% discount and in the second year I was unknowingly charged for renewal.

How was I charged unknowingly?

There is one option “auto renew me with the same debit card” which is by default set to “ON” by these cheap service providers who are there to loot you. So remember to turn these options off whenever you buy your hosting.

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This time I was aware my hosting is about to end in November, so I decided to take the bold step of changing the service.

Started looking for better options and then I found one. This time I made 2 good decisions after a lot of searching and analysing.

  • I took the hosting again on sale of 75% with better and improved servers that had SDD servers.
  • I took the hosting for 2 years so the discount counted for 2 years. That means hosting worth 8000 had cost me 3500 around.

So always try to make you first hosting deal online on Black Friday or cyber Monday that happens just after thanks giving. During this period you get the most possible discount on almost all hosting providers and that too as high as 80%.

Now another thing that you should always take care of:-you should always have a pre-purchase talk with the customer care or support service to know their way of transferring. Luckily in my case they were ready to do the transfer and help me in the smooth movement.

But again you cannot just rely on their words and have to take all the necessary precautions that will help you keep your data safe.

Since this was my first time so they told me they would copy my cpanel from the current hosting to the new hosting. For that I just need to provide them with the cpanel login details.

Now I did the same they asked for. Open a ticket and gave them the login details. Soon after 3 hours I got a reply that you transfer has completed. I was shocked to know this, as the support told me that it takes around 24 hours for the transfer.

I went to my new cpanel and started looking it thoroughly. I opened my wp-uploads file manager and looked for my data. Shockingly my media files were not there.

I immediately opened the ticket and asked them to check the disk space usage in my 2 cpanels  and compare them. There was 1.1 GB of difference between the 2.

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So moral of the story, never believe what they show you. Check yourself.

how to transfer website from one hosting to another
hosting transfer tips and solutions

Now I will give you some points that you can follow to keep your data safe and go for the hosting transfer tension free.

  • Always keep the data copy at your end. How to do that? Create a backup of your latest database. Now download that on your local system. This way you have the zip form of all your website data.
  • Always crosscheck for the transfer, it might not have gone through complete transfer and there might be some issues that can be checked manually.
  • Mysql database is available in cpanel. Do create one and download that on your local system.
  • Important point to remember “Never tell you current hosting provider that you are going to leave the hosting and shift to some other hosting”. Sometimes we decide to inform our hosting provider prior to shifting to new, that we are changing the hosting and we do not need its services after the term completion. This results in a big mistake because the hosting provider sometimes intentionally put your servers down for sometime so that in panic you would renew the hosting and you won’t be able to take the backup of your hosting data.
  • Always try to make the hosting transfer at least 1 week before your current hosting term competition. This will give you ample of time to judge the successful transfer of hosting data on new servers and any modification can be taken care in the given time.
  • Copying cpanel from current hosting servers to new servers reduces the downtime of servers.

One Confusion that always remains in my mind is “should I keep my hosting in India or outside India”?

  • You need to make that decision based on your blogging grounds. Take into account your visitors graphs, are they from India or US.
  • If you blog has many affiliate links then I think you should go for US hosting since that attracts more of US crowd and that will help you make more of your affiliate marketing.
  • Do you feel that you need to promote your website more in India or outside? Are you domain .in or .com?
  • Do you need better customer support or is chat support is just fine for you? In India hosting support over phone is possible while in US hosting that is a rare case to encounter.
  • Speed of your blog/website is another major concern. If you are having a very cheap hosting then this issue can only be resolved if your hosting is in your area. If you are having a good hosting package then surely this won’t be a big concern for you.
  • Hosting in India then you will be charged in rupees else in dollars mostly. And pray that dollar is not very costly at the time of purchase. So that tells that hosting in India is bit cheaper than US hosting but that extra money actually gives some extra benefits of services as well like 99% uptime.
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So break the ground and make a quick and profitable decision and finally a fruitful purchase because your hosting is going to give your blog and website a big boost in its overall performance in terms of speed, agility, services and quality.

Do let us know if you have any doubt in your hosting purchase options and feel free to ask us or share with us your hosting experience.

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One thought on “How to Swiftly and Securely Transfer WordPress Hosting

  1. Hi Tara,

    You should try and make the hosting purchase at the right time when the maximum discount is running on like during the black friday and cyber monday. If you wish to continue with the same hosting provider then there is no other way then to pay what they ask for but good hosting providers usually charge genuine amount which is very much payable.

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