Your website hosting service may not be cutting it. Is it time to move to a new host? Most services claim that they can provide 99.9% up time but is it really true. Even some of the best server hosting companies are not meeting their claims.
Shared web hosting today is not the same as it was in the early 2000s. Back then you were not hosting your website on a single server that have more than 1000 customers. It was more likely to purchase a very cheap shared hosting plan with less than 100 websites on one server. Shared hosting plans are a great start for developing a website but in the long run they will never be able to handle even basic traffic. And to top that off most of them are battling down time and server abuse. Now a days there is so much more scamming and misuse of servers you really have no idea what you neighbor is doing. Most likely you reached this blog because you had enough and need to migrate into a more stable web platform.
One quick option is to work with companies that have a small amount of clients on a Dedicated Server or VPS. You may pay more but you will not pay as much as hosting your own dedicated server. Your performance will be 1000% better and you will probably experience little to no down times. Remember down time means money lost especially when you are hosting important company operations.
So lets discuss the migration of all your website and mail from one host to another. First your mail folder can be found in your root directory. If you are not sure where your root directory exists log into Cpanel and click on file manager. When it first opens it will ask you if you want to navigate to root. Set it to root which is one folder level under public_html.
Backup your mail folder using the compress function. It can be found top right in file manager. A .tar file is best because it will compress faster making big mail backups a lot easier.
Now backup your public_html folder the same way. Don’t forget your databases. In Cpanel click on phpMyAdmin
and open your databases. Click export database and this will allow you to backup your database to your local PC. Finally download a free FTP program and transfer the .tar files to your PC.
Now you can cancel your hosting account and start a new account with a new hosting provider. Do not make them think that its not easy to migrate all your data from one provider to the next. Most hosting companies charge ridiculous prices for migrating from one server to another. Its not as difficult as most might think.
If you want a more detailed description or help leave some comments below. You can also give us a call and we can help you walk through a smooth server migration / upgrade.