How Hard is it to Migrate a Website to a New Server?

[city17]

I've got (very much a beginner) question about hosting. I'm just starting out with my new website, and I was wondering how hard it is to transfer to different hosting? I've heard good things about for example WPengine, but since I don't know yet how well my website will do, I don't really want to spend that money yet. I'd prefer to start somewhere cheap (thinking of AWS Lightsail WP instance) and transfer if my site gets traction.

 

[Noisegen]

I've got (very much a beginner) question about hosting. I'm just starting out with my new website, and I was wondering how hard it is to transfer to different hosting? I've heard good things about for example WPengine, but since I don't know yet how well my website will do, I don't really want to spend that money yet. I'd prefer to start somewhere cheap (thinking of AWS Lightsail WP instance) and transfer if my site gets traction.

Depending on the tools available at the various hosts, it’s pretty easy to switch hosts without too much difficulty.

If you are starting out and have no WordPress knowledge, it may be easier to use a shared host that has cPanel as their interface. Bluehost is a common one, Siteground, Hostgator, etc. You can find hosting at various places for less than $10/mo.

Start with cheap shared hosting, and as you grow and earn some revenue, switch to VPS hosting that’s more focused on speed. I think I pay about $20/mo for Cloudways/Digital Ocean, and it works very well. Migration was easy, and their support is great.

Im not really familiar with WPEngine, but if their lowest-priced plan is $35/mo, I would stay away. It looks like they include the Genesis framework and themes. That’s cool, but if you like Genesis (I use it) just purchase it and your theme separately.

Go with shared hosting and put that savings into content. Once you’re far enough in that you feel you need to focus on speed and bandwidth, find a VPS provider that has good migration tools. As I mentioned, Cloudways is one.

 

[nibsam]

I've got (very much a beginner) question about hosting. I'm just starting out with my new website, and I was wondering how hard it is to transfer to different hosting? I've heard good things about for example WPengine, but since I don't know yet how well my website will do, I don't really want to spend that money yet. I'd prefer to start somewhere cheap (thinking of AWS Lightsail WP instance) and transfer if my site gets traction.

I suggest using smaller or shared hosting like siteground or bluehost or namecheap easywp at first.
I've you'd like to move hosting, most hosting provider provide migration service as well.

 

[returntrip]

I've got (very much a beginner) question about hosting. I'm just starting out with my new website, and I was wondering how hard it is to transfer to different hosting? I've heard good things about for example WPengine, but since I don't know yet how well my website will do, I don't really want to spend that money yet. I'd prefer to start somewhere cheap (thinking of AWS Lightsail WP instance) and transfer if my site gets traction.

I highly recommend using Cloudways as Noisegen mentioned as well. If you've got a PHP based site, it's a pretty great wrapper for cloud providers that can make your life very easy.

Automatically setting up staging sites, lets encrypt, server settings at your fingertips if you're not very server savvy, backups, super simple migration plugin, varnish cache does a good job for saving resources as well.

The only thing you need to keep an eye out for is a third party SMTP server as most of these cloud instances don't have that out of the box.

As someone who's worked at dev agencies for years, this has been one of the more solid hosting providers that haven't completely shit the bed.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@thehobbster posted a nice walkthrough a while back: How to Transfer a Wordpress Site to a New Server and Domain. It's still completely applicable.

Most hosts will do a cPanel to cPanel migration for you when you sign up so all of your email addresses and accounts are the same, etc.

Otherwise, if you don't want to do it manually, there's plenty of plugins to migrate the site around, but you'll have to set up your other stuff like MySQL usernames and FTP accounts again.

 

[bernard]

WPEngine does the migration for you.