Moving Home of this Site

Since a while I am contemplating to move away from Bluehosst.com because of various issues but mostly because I am having issues with connecting to the Mail Server from time to time and this is plain annoying. A little bit of an effort on their site would made have stayed but I got more or less no help.

A New Web Site Host

Since I started looking I never found a good host. Next week my hosting at Bluehost.com was up for renewal and so I was finally forced to act. Initially I tried out Squarespace.com but their support of handling Source Code was not really good and neither Markdown nor BlogText was really supported and I was not inclined to use a special text component to display source code.
So last Week I got a notice from my registrar Register4Less that they offer Web Hosting that would fit my need. Because time was of the essence I ordered their hosting for a year. Then I wrote down what had to be done to move:

1. Backup WordPress using the Dropbox backup
2. Upgrade WordPress to the latest version
3. Download the WordPress files from Bluehost
4. Export the DB using phpAdmin
5. Uploading the WordPress files to Register4Less
6. Create the MySQL DB
7. MySQL Admin and WordPress User and give them the right permissions
8. Import the WordPress Export
9. Change my local /etc/hosts to test
10. Test the WordPress Site
11. Undo the /etc/hosts changes
12. Create the Email Accounts
13. Transfer the Emails using imapsync using MacPorts
14. Testing the Emails on the new Server
15. Create / Adjust the DNS Settings at Register4Less
16. Change the DNS Name Servers at Register4Less for my Domain
17. Test the Life WordPress Site and Email Server

I expected that this would take the entire weekend to accomplish. But because the setup at Bluehost and Register4Less are so similar (both use Linux, cPanel, FTP etc) I was done within about 9 hours which is lightning fast.

Pitfalls

The first problem I caused myself was when I through that I had to change the Domain Name inside the WordPress DB records until I realized that using /etc/hosts was much easier. Then I had some issues with imapsync and because I did not want to pollute my Mac Box I used a VMware Fusion virtual machine to install MacPort and imapsync. It was slower but if anything went wrong because of the MacPorts etc I could just ditch the virtual machine. At the end everything ran smoothly and straight forward. Finally the change of the DNS entries took some time because of an initial misconfiguration and then I had to wait until the previous settings finally expired (3h TTL).

Result

Best result is if nobody would notice and so far I looks good based on my initial smoke screen tests. I am still expecting some issues but so far I was impressed how easy and fast it was. WordPress, MySQL / phpAdmin and cPanel are really easy to do a move like that. Let’s cross our fingers that the Mail Server problems are a thing of the past to make the effort worthwhile.

At the end I want to thank Dough from the Register4Less Support team for his help otherwise this would have been a way longer story.

— Andy Schaefer