After spending a year with Flywheel paying $15/month for hosting I decided it was time for a change.  Just so we are clear I think Flywheel is excellent and I love their UI as well as the Local By Flywheel tool. However, I could not justify the cost of paying for a website that was just sitting there collecting dust.

So in my search to find a new host I decided to hit Twitter and see if anyone had anything noteworthy to say on hosting providers.  Low and behold a few hosting companies I had never heard of before hit me up.  Prior to consulting with  Twitter, I had heavily considering SiteGround as my new hosting provider.  The reason I was keen on SiteGround is that that is who we use to host clients for where I work and I wanted to become more comfortable and skilled at working on the hosting side.

However, I decided to not go that route.  Instead, I  decided to check out the first company that reached out to me on Twitter SetraHost.  I hadn’t heard anything about them so I decided to check out their website and social media pages.  I didn’t find anything incriminating, so I decided to check out their pricing.  It was impressive.

Their premium plan that I ended up pulling the trigger on was $4.16/month for 20 GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, 10 domains hosted, 1 free domain plus the ability to make all the subdomains you want and the traditional cPanel experience.  They would even assist you with a free site migration as well ( not uncommon among hosting providers these days ).   I felt confident in my ability and wanted to do the site migration myself and forgo the free assistance.  I’d never done a site migration before , but I figured I’ve seen it done and what I’m not sure on I can Google.

 I recommend attempting a site migration yourself when you KNOW you don’t have to worry about email.  If you or a client have been using email within a hosting environment use the free site migration the web host if offers.  They have special tools you don’t have access to.

Migrating your site the old fashioned way from FlyWheel

1) Boot up Transmit ( i.e. FTP Client ) and FTP into your FlyWheel directory and start transferring the files to your local environment.

This involved dragging my site directory into my downloads folder and then going out to dinner and doing various household chores while I waited.

2) Figure out where your database file is then export it to your downloads folder.   If you have Flywheel go here.

3) Log into your new hosting account and venture into the cPanel to create a database.

I figured since I was going to be importing a NEW database I should probably click on the MySQL Database Wizard to create one.  For those of you who have major anxiety about making your own database below are some visuals:

 

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4) Heading back to the cPanel with my newly created database I realized that I now have to import the database I downloaded earlier.   So to do that head over to phpMyAdmin.

1.  Click on the database you just created, because currently all that exists is an empty shell of nothing .
2.  Look for an import button and click on it.
   
3. Click ‘choose file’, read through the checked options just to make sure you aren’t missing anything and then click ‘GO’.

 The first time I clicked go I had an error but that was only because I had unchecked one of the boxes, so I went through and made sure it was checked and then clicked “GO” again.  Botta bing botta boom my database was imported without a hitch.

Initially I was a little concerned about what I should name my database and whether it needed to match the database file I had downloaded.  In the end it didn’t matter.  Everything went where it needed to go.

5) Now that all the files at this point had finally made it across FTP,  go ahead and compress them and swiftly head back over to the cPanel into the ‘File Manager’.  Once there, upload the files into the root directory or public_html.

6)  Now even though my website files were in the root, the actual WordPress files were not.  They were located in a directory called shansen30 ( your directory will be different ).   So I opened up shansen30, copied all the files and then moved them to public_html.

7)  Now that you have your database imported and site files upload the next step is to connect your database.  To do that you go into the wp-config.php file which will be located in your ‘file manager‘ and look for the following:

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘what_you_named_your_database‘);

define(‘DB_USER’, ‘your_database_username‘);

define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘your_database_password‘);

Replace ‘what_you_named_your_database’ with your database name;‘your_database_username’ with your database username and finally your ‘your_database_password’ with your database password.  Save the file and exit your file manager.

8)  Now your site should be ready to go.  The very final steps involves heading over to your registrar and changing where the nameservers are pointed.  I use NameCheap.

1.   Domain List -)  Find the domain name and then click the ‘manage‘ button next to it
2.   Scroll down to ‘NameServers‘  click the drop down and select ‘Custom DNS
3.   Add the host provided NameServers and save.

Check out your website,  because you are live baby!

SetraHost Knoweldge Base
SiteGround: How to transfer your website to another host