Move from Free to Paid Hosting

Bessie Knows Best (www.bessieknowsbest.co.uk) is a caravan review website for Northern Ireland and up until yesterday it had been hosted at no cost by 000webhost.

I have hosted a few personal websites on 000webhost in the past, and while it is great to avail of free hosting, I decided to move Bessie to paid for hosting for a number of reasons:

• Reliability was noticeably worse than my paid hosting. For example, quite often my email client failed to retrieve email when it was asked.
• Certain functionality in the CPanel, for example, backing up the website failed regularly.
• It was not possible to update my WordPress Blog to the latest version of WordPress automatically as there is a 2MB upload_max_filesize limit imposed by 000webhost. This meant i had to do it manually.

It is very easy to move a WordPress Blog from one host to another where the domain name will not be changing.

• Copy all files from the old host to the new host.
• Backup the database from the old host
• Create a new database on the new host. Create a database user and give that user the appropriate privileges for the database.
• Import the database to the new host.
• Modify the ‘DB_NAME’, ‘DB_USER’, ‘DB_PASSWORD’ and ‘DB_HOST’ in the wp-config.php to reflect the new host’s database.