I have been hosting my blogs at Hostgator shared hosting account for almost three years now. A few days ago I decided to move all my blogs from shared hosting to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with WiredTree.
Shared hosting is good and cheap up to a certain traffic level, but when your websites’ traffic starts to increase, an upgraded hosting account is essential.
Moreover, a VPS server provides better security in my opinion compared to shared hosting. On a shared package, where you are located on the same server with hundreds of other websites, a compromised (hacked) website can jeopardize the security and confidentiality of your own website as well.
So after some extensive research I found wiredtree’s managed VPS hosting to be a reliable and excellent solution.
What persuaded me to go with their hosting solution is that they provide peace of mind in terms of management of your server, plus they offer also proactive monitoring and excellent security mechanisms (ServerShield Server Hardening and continuous security protection).
In this article I will provide you with the steps I followed to move my websites and blogs from my old hosting account to my new hosting service.
The steps described below will be a little bit high level but I can help you with more details if you ask me in the comments section below.
My hosting situation was as following:
I have several domains registered at 1and1 and as I said I was hosting my websites at Hostgator (Baby Plan shared hosting package).
So all of my domains had their DNS settings at 1and1 pointing to my Hostgator DNS servers. After setting up your new VPS server you need to change each domain’s DNS settings at your registrar (1and1 in my case) to point to your new hosting provider.
Also, note that at HostGator I was using cPanel as a control panel for managing my hosting, so this is something to consider when purchasing a new hosting plan. It is much better to choose cPanel again on your new hosting server.
Steps I followed to Move from old hosting to new hosting
Step 1: Purchasing my VPS1000 at WiredTree
First of all you need to select a hostname for your VPS server. You must have a valid domain for this. For example if your domain is “mydomain.com”, then select a hostname such as:
myserver.mydomain.com
I selected one of the domains I have and entered that in the field for the hostname.
Then, I selected cPanel as a Control Panel option and then entered all required information.
After payment you will receive an email stating that you will receive a phone call from wiredtree to verify your purchase. The next day I received a phone call and my account was verified and ready within one hour after the phone verification.
Step 2: Account Created and Ready
When your account is created, you will receive an email with all of your account details. WiredTree will install WHM and cPanel on your VPS server and give you the root password and also your “Grove Website” login details.
Grove (grove.wiredtree.com) is their client portal in which you set up several important parameters (such as DNS Zone Files) and also is the place to use for opening support tickets.
Also, WHM (Web Host Manager) is the place where you configure everything related to the whole VPS server (i.e creating more cPanel accounts, configure security settings, DNS settings, network configuration, manage reseller packages, set bandwidth limits for accounts etc).
If you use your VPS server to sell hosting services to other people, then from WHM you control the resources and accounts that you provide to customers.
cPanel is the place where you configure individual domain related hosting settings. Under cPanel you configure email accounts for the domain, you manage the website files of the domain, you create FTP accounts etc.
Each cPanel must have its own primary domain assigned to it, and you can also add more “addon” domains under the same cPanel account if you want.
Step 3: Transferring my first blog from Hostgator to Wiredtree
Since I already had a cPanel account created (from Wiredtree) for my first website blog, I was ready to transfer my first site.
First I had to transfer all the files of my wordpress blog from hostgator to wiredtree. I logged in Hostgator and compressed all the files of my blog and downloaded the zip file to my computer.
Then I logged in cPanel at wiredtree and uploaded the zip file (using “File Manager”) and decompressed it under the “public_html” folder.
Then I created a new database at wiredtree (under cPanel, MySQL Databases) and also created a new user which I added in the database. Write down the following details of the new database:
- DB name
- DB Username
- DB Password
Then go in “File Manager” in cPanel, find the file “wp-config.php” and click on “edit”. Change the old database details and put the new ones which you have already created (DB Name, Username, Password).
Then you need to export the wordpress database from your old hosting provider. I logged in cPanel in Hostgator and clicked on “phpmyAdmin” icon. I selected the database and clicked on “Export”.
Then clicked “Go” and I downloaded the SQL database to my computer. After that, I had to import this database file in the new database I created on my new VPS server. Clicked on “phpmyAdmin” at Wiredtree and selected “Import”. Everything went smoothly here with no problems.
Step 4: Created email accounts on my new host
On my old hosting account I had 3 email accounts related to my first blog that I was going to transfer. So I had to recreate these email accounts on my new wiredtree server. Under cPanel go to “Email Accounts” and create the same emails as the old ones.
Step 5: DNS Settings
As stated before, you must change your DNS settings of the domain that you want to move from the old hosting account. First of all you must create a DNS Zone in Grove portal of wiredtree.
Log in to grove.wiredtree.com and click on “NETWORK/DNS”. Click on “Add a DNS Zone” and put your Domain name and its IP address (assigned to you from wiredtree). I left everything as default without changing anything.
After that, I logged in my registrar account (1and1) and changed the DNS settings of the domain that I wanted to move to the new host.
The new DNS settings were the primary and secondary servers of my new hosting provider (in my case ns1.wiredtree.com and ns2.wiredtree.com). These settings need between 10-24 hours to propagate fully through the Internet.
End Result
The next day my blog was fully operational on my new hosting provider. I immediately noticed that the blog is loading much faster than before and hopefully will be more secure as well!!!
Other Steps
After transferring my first blog, I had to move over my other websites as well. I created a new cPanel account for each of my other websites (domains). The cPanel accounts are created under WHM (“Account Functions” > “Create a new Account”).
You also have the option to assign a new IP address to each of your domain. With wiredtree VPS hosting you get 4 IP addresses for free.
After creating my cPanel accounts, I transferred my other blogs from Hostgator using the same steps as described above. Everything worked great and now all of my websites are hosted at wiredtree VPS1000 server.
I’m open to questions if you want more details. Send me your questions in the comments section below.
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