HowTo – Basic Overview of Required Steps to Change Hosting of your WordPress Website

Filed under: Wordpress Tips

This howto covers the basic steps of moving hosting companies … it does not go into detail of moving your wordpress website from one host to another however if you even if you are using the same domain name there may be extended problems you run into within the WordPress database .. the most common is webroot directories that are stored by plugins such as nextgen or cache plugins… in this case you will need to find replace inside your database to change these locations.

Lets look at what you want to remember when changing Web Hosting companies in General

When you are moving hosts it is best to do a full cPanel backup first
This will include all of the files and databases in your account and email folders forwards.. everything basically….

You can use that backup to move..

then you can do a webroot backup of your files

do a mysql backup of all your databases.

Then once you are moved and up on the other site…

detach all your domains.

go in and delete all your files and email accounts and databases.

You will still leave behind some traces that you can not delete like your logs
and of course they will have your backups for a while… maybe a year
dont expect them to give you them

Then finally you want to make sure that every password on your new host is changed.

change your DBUSER Pass .. your Salt in the wp-config
force all your users to change their passwords.. there is a plugin for that
change all your email passwords
change all your ftp passwords…

Basically all of it…

if a company has a backup

or you leave behind files with passwords..

you may never know that someone is accessing your website or email with your old passwords ..

so change them