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Switching a site from Hostgator to Media Temple in a few easy steps

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I made the decision to move some of my mission critical WordPress websites from Hostgator to (mt) Media Temple and so far I have had a very positive experience with the company.  The process of migrating a website was fairly simple because of an auto-migration feature offered by Media Temple where all I had to do was enter a few credentials for my FTP and WordPress logins and they took care of the rest.640px-network_switches

Specifically, I took the following steps (combination of instructions from Media Temple and my own precautions):

  1. Create a Local ‘Migration’ Folder
  2. Export All Posts from Current Site
  3. Make a Local Copy of wp-content file via FTP
  4. Export Database Backup
  5. Provide Media Temple with My Login Credentials
  6. Initiate Migration
  7. Repoint Nameservers

There were a few hiccups that I ran into along the way.

  • The first site I migrated did not look the same as the staging site when I moved it to Production.  This turned out to be a simple issue with the theme where I had not activated the default menu.  Once I did that, it was all good.
  • Replicating a .htaccess file redirect that I had in place with one of my sites still does not seem to be working

A Final Bonus

It is such a breath of fresh air to have a human to speak to when I need support.  Media Temple offers as one of their support functions the ability to call a support agent using Skype.  I was never on hold more than a couple of minutes and each time the person that helped me was knowledgeable and pointed me in the right direction.  This further reinforced my resolve that moving my mission critical sites to Media Temple was the right thing to do.

Migrating from Hostgator to Media Temple

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Ever since I began self-hosting my WordPress sites, I have used Hostgator as my hosting provider. I started out with their Baby plan which was a shared hosting solution when I only had a few sites, then about 9 months ago I moved up to their reseller plan as I was thinking about providing hosting services to some of my clients.  I have been pleased with the value pricing because I don’t have a large budget at the moment, but this week I realized the downside of this solution versus a managed hosting solution when dealing with clients that have a large user base.

Hostgator had a major outage on its reseller servers due to an OS upgrade this week and all their clients that were hosting sites there suddenly lost service.  I found out about this from one of my clients in a polite email where he informed me that the two sites that I host for him were down.  He is in the process of launching a book and his blog and website are a critical component of his marketing campaign – I can imagine having his followers call or text him that his site is down was not a great experience for him.

As bad as it was for me, it was much worse for others:

So to be proactive in case something like this happened again in the future, I researched managed hosting and found what seems to be a pretty good plan with Media Temple’s Premium WordPress Hosting.  You get 3 WordPress installs, 20GB of storage plus lots of other goodies for $29/month.  Additional sites are only $9/month with an extra 5GB of storage.  That’s plenty to work with on most of the sites that I manage.

I won’t be migrating all of my sites to this solution, but for the mission critical sites of paying clients, this is my new solution for a couple of reasons:

  1. This is not (at least yet) my full time gig and its only fair to clients that when there is an issue there is dedicated staff to deal with it
  2. As much as I have learned on the technical side of sys admin type functions with WordPress, the time spent troubleshooting those type of issues (backups, security etc.) detracts from the time I could spend mastering the web design and theme building aspects of the platform – which is where I know my real strengths lie

Since this is a new approach, I decided to first try it out on one of my own sites, so I migrated my main business site over.  There were a few hiccups in the process, but overall it went quite smoothly.  I will have a post later this week about the steps I took and some of the troubleshooting I had to do.