Successfully Changed Web Host - How I did When Changing From One Host To The Other

Yesterday, I took a big step to changing Web Host. I was previously hosted at XtraOrbit which was a great disappointment and not worth my money. I had 5 more months on my paid contract with them, but I could not withstand staying there anymore. I will soon make a review of it. Anyway, I’m now hosted at HostIcan. Infact I emailed quite a lot of web hosts before making that decision. I wanted to go with Media Temple’s GS, but I recently read a lot of negative reviews while googling and besides they simply never replied to my email which is pretty shocking for a web host of its calibre.

Hostican Offers A Wide Choice

HostIcan has several plans. You can start with Base-Host going upwards to Tera-Host, VPS, Dedicated, Extreme..etc..etc (I will write a review later on). So, you have the choice of upgrading your account anytime, so no worries.

Experience Makes Things Easy

It is now the 3rd time that I’m changing web host. The first time was great pain, the 2nd time was average, but the 3rd time, that is yesterday, everything went out super smooth. This is greatly because of the experience and maturity that I’m accumulating through time. I have always been deploying my installations by myself, whether be it forum deployment or blogs. Despite the fact that HostIcan offers to handle the transfer for you, I insisted to do everything on my own.
TIP: They will even buy out your previous hosting contract.

The Actual Transfer - STEP 1

The transfer was foreseen to be on sunday after lunch. So, since saturday, I have been working a lot with my previous host and I did the following:
1) Made a backup of my recent blog database. PhpMyAdmin helps you do that with the “Export” button. This basically lets you download your database in the form of a ‘file.sql’
2) I downloaded my own custom made theme via FTP
3) Downloaded my plugins too, to make sure everything stays the same.
4) And finally downloaded everything important lying on the root of my domain.

STEP 2

After these initial steps done, I immediately went to my domain account to change the nameservers to point to HostIcan’s nameservers.

 Note that domain names takes long to propagate to another nameserver, aka NS.

I actually change NS for four of my domains, yesterday. Wakish.com and wakish.info took around 19hrs to propagate, while the other two domains took only around 6hrs and 30mins respectively. I have not been able to relate why one of them took as short as 30 mins while the others took longer (normal time frame for propagation). Will figure that out soon hopefuly.

STEP 3

After all set, I rushed to buy hosting at my new host, HostIcan. It took around 30mins for my account to be active. Note that HostIcan provides 1 free domain name which is used as my main domain on my account. Once set, I rushed and did the following:

1) Created other addon domains to host my blog..etc, for example I created addon for wakish.info - Wakish Wonderz
2) Restored database for wakish wonderz. This is as simple as using the import button on PhpMyAdmin. But I prefer doing this DB restore by executing the scripts via the SQL console.
3) Uploaded and Extracted wordpress package.
4) I then restored my theme and plugins directory as they were from my previous host.

==> Last, I then configured robots.txt, which I consider very important.

That’s it! Now it was time to wait for my domains to land home .
The next day, that is monday, when I accessed my domain, everything was normal, running as if no transfer took place. That’s why I said the transfer for this 3rd time was more than perfect.

A small question that you might have: “Wakish, but is there the need to re-install wordpress?”
=> Well, if you do as I said above, there’s absolutely no need for an install. Since an install in essence is simply creating and hooking a database with the php/html pages. As you read above, I already ‘placed’ the wordpress files, the database, themes and plugins. So everything would run ‘as was’ and you can login with the same name/password as before. Is that not super cool?

Has any of you changed web host, how was your experience?