How To Shift A WordPress Blog? (To A Reliable, Cheap, Fast Host)

By Raj | Jun 30, 2008

One of the wishes lying deep in my mind for the past nine months was to shift this WordPress blog from Yahoo Hosting to some other, reliable, cheap hosting as I was having troubles with Yahoo Hosting as described in my earlier post “Importance of backing up blog regularly.” The trouble list with WordPress blog on Yahoo Hosting included:

Outdated version of WordPress.
Hundreds of bugs due to outdated version of WordPress.
Less facilities/usability due to outdated version of WordPress.
Unavailability of canonical redirect required for search engine optimization (or optimisation). (Check out what you lose in SEO in the above mentioned post on canonical redirects.)
You have only write access to .htacess file, but if anything goes wrong, you cannot replace .htacess file via FTP access, and your blog goes blank.
Succumbing to multiple hacks due to outdated version/bugs/security compromise.
Issues with downtimes and lack of satisfactory reply from customer service in this regard.
About 800 and odd sites sharing the same IP on a hosting plan of $11.95 a month in which I was in.
Poor customer support, many times it seemed to be automated replies when contacted by email.

Being obsessed with blogging and not willing to give up at any point in time just because of issues like this, I developed a strong urge to move out of Yahoo for about the last nine months on a stint of one year with Yahoo Hosting.

Since being not a techie, I was afraid of packing up and moving to another host but after some googling, I got some confidence and decided, “Come on, this is not such an onerous task, okay let me take the risk than bear the brunt here at Yahoo.”

Now that I have decided to migrate to a new host, the next question was “Who next?” The post “How to choose a web host?” was helpful in this regard. My requirements were:

Cheap and affordable hosting.
Fast loading time of the web pages.
Reliable; downtime should be the least possible.
Fair customer service.
cPanel for site configuration and management as there was a good opinion about cPanel.
Dedicated IP.
Virtual private server (VPS) if feasible at a low cost.

Even there was a discussion going on everybody vouching for some favorite web hosting and after doing a little googling, I picked three. They were BlueFur, Doreo and WestHost. WestHost has attractive plans with virtual private server option available and I thought of zeroing in on it but I was not satisfied with the page loading time of the sites hosted by them.

Comparison Chart of Web Site Speed/Loading Times

MT Herald was on Yahoo Hosting while this test was done. The last three dailies were on Doreo Hosting and the rest with West Host. Thanks to Self SEO for doing this test for me.

Hence I ended up with Doreo Hosting satisfied with the facts that:

The hosting is cheap and affordable with plans starting from as little as $6.99 a month for 2GB storage space and 60 GB data transfer.
The page loading time is fast.
Have proof of least downtime, high speed and ability to handle heavy traffic, hence reliable.
The customer service being excellent, I fired about 100 e-mails to clear my doubts before getting started and during the installation process, and all of them were answered to my satisfaction in a matter of seconds by their CEO, Mr. Frank himself.
I am getting cPanel, really a cool tool to control all the activities of my site at one place.
I am getting dedicated IP for an extra $1.50 per month.
Additionally I am having Fantastico for installing those free softwares like WordPress and forums, and MailFoundry to trap all those spam mails to my domain.

Once finalized the web hosting service provider, now the task is to move the blog. So before migrating, I have to back up the blog files to take it to the new host. The step by step illustration with pictures of “Backing up your database” of your WordPress blog is helpful in this regard.

Now it’s shifting of the WordPress files. The article “How to move blog to a new host?” and the post on setting up TTL or time to live will be helpful in this regard. I utilized only the old database while I skipped the old WordPress files as it was outdated version of WordPress 2.0.2 with Yahoo Hosting. Instead I made a fresh installation of WordPress at the new host and downloaded only the database. The post “Restoring your database from backup” will help you downloading the database to your new blog at the new host. That’s all, I am done with. It was very much easy to enact the process once you understand thoroughly with all the references made here rather than illustrating it in words. The only problem that I encountered while moving WordPress blog was that the posts were injected with some weird special characters and it was rectified by just changing utf8 to utf-8 in the file wp-config.php. Note the hyphen that is to be added; don’t know if that’s a bug in the WordPress. Choose whatever host, the process to shift WordPress blog from old host to new host is the same process that I said here.