I was forced to change from my former hosting company to a new one after a protracted “incessant server outage”. My former hosting company support staff are quite friendly and they tried to encourage me to continue using their service, however, after receiving several emails and queries from my readers complaining that my website is often offline, I knew I had to change.
Why did it take me so long to change? Simple, I was afraid of the process of changing from one web hosting company to another. I have read several posts on the necessary steps to take, and my new hosting company promised to assist me all the way, but I wasn’t convinced. There are too many scary stories of people loosing their entire posts and other valuable data during such changes. There is also the danger of loosing Google Rank and other traffic statistics that had been built up with so much effort.
After one month of struggling with the decision, I knew I had to take the risk, now or I may end up with the whole website disappearing one day. Also, it is either I take the risk, or I loose my readers because of the constant embarrassment they face each time they visit my site and it is down. How long can I keep pacifying them by apologizing? They sure have better things to do with their time.
Even though I took all the precaution stated in the several articles that I read about moving a website from one hosting company to another, I still suffered a lot of hitches because of the following issues:
- My internet connection speed is very slow. Some of the files that I backup got damaged while been downloaded to my desktop computer.
- My blog is not in its original WordPress.org format. I have done a lot of tweaking and I failed to follow the advice of my mentor to write down the modifications so that I will remember what exactly I did. So, it was not just as simple as backing up the wp-content folder and my databases, there were other files to be backed up because I hacked the originals. Stupid me, I failed to keep record of the files and the tweaking done, so I am back to square one!
- The configuration of the new host server is not exactly the same with the old server, so some things were broken and had to be fixed manually.
Well enough of the bad news, after 48hours of sweating and wishing I never had to change host company, the website is up again and I believe, there will be no more outage (please if you notice any broken link, inform me, thanks). If you visited during the outage, I apologize for the inconvenience. Thanks for repeating the visit. I really appreciate your encouragement. If you have a tip or story to share about changing hosting company, we sure will like you to share it in the comment section. Cheers.
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Nice to see you and running! 🙂 I’m sure it will be well worth the move. I have no clue about any thing technical or blog set up etc. (When I made my move I paid someone set up the blog theme and plugins and can’t afford to do that again!). I’m glad my hosting company has been awesome, and so long as it stays that way I won’t have to move.
Previously I was on frees blogs – Blogger and then WordPress.com – what a nightmare, and moving from one to the other was rough. When I went to my own domain I just moved each post over manually one by one — took forever.
@Lady Rose
Thanks for your words of encouragement. I really don’t pray for another move. It was indeed a nightmare. Irrespective of assurances from those that are technical experts, I don’t want such experience again. I prefer writing articles and networking instead of banging my head to understand why my blog is down or a link is broken 😉
hope everything’s fine now, I had the same experience with my previous hosting provider. I have no choice but to move, it’s for oure own goods 🙂
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@Horhafidz
Thanks pal. I am still working on it. The site is mostly stable now, but there are still some few things I need to sort out. For example, the Simple Forum I installed is broken and I am yet to decide wether to reinstall or remove it altogether. Thanks for visiting.
Thanks !
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Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. 🙂 Cheers! Sandra. R.
There is a simpler way of transferring websites without the risk of losing data. All you needed to do was give your new webhosting company the username and password to your old web hosting account and they would have just transferred the the whole account for you (including settings and email). After the transfer, everything would just be the same with the only difference being the change in your IP address.
Perhaps your new host does not offer this but that is what we do for new clients who have accounts hosted elsewhere and are looking to transfer.
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