Move from Bluehost to Hostgator Almost

The decision to move from Bluehost to Hostgator was made early this year when Bluehost became sluggish with excessive downtimes.

My business website built entirely from WordPress also includes scripts in the back end for CRM and emails. To create a good impression on customers, we cannot afford anymore impromptu website disappearing act caused by the web hosting company.

Today is the day to take action. Move from Bluehost to Hostgator.

Here are several backup steps I took before proceeding.

1. Save Essential Sales Pages

In case the transfer process fail, we can continue business from another domain quickly with the downloaded and saved pages. (wanted to duplicate the sales pages on Facebook page, but Facebook removed it’s multiple FBML tabs feature).

Sales Pages include home page, services pages, course pages, about us and contact us.

We have only 10 essential sales pages to save. The rest are hidden or script generated.

Let’s login to WordPress and explore any hidden pages worth saving just in case.

Found 5 pages of Videography mini e-course for subscribers. Very well written content that must be saved.

The other 100 non-essential hidden pages can be recreated any time when needed but really most of them are not required any more, like ad-hoc promos, and can be deleted.

2. Save Popular Blog Posts

I have 90 blog posts in VideoLane.com and some of them are so informative that majority of traffic are coming from them.

These popular blog posts are so well received that they are directly linked from other people’s websites. It’s an honor and it’ll be a pity if not being transferred successfully.

So instead of saving all 90 posts, I will save the top 10 traffic bringers based on Google Analytics stats.

Maybe I should create a fresh WordPress site to suck in all the existing blog posts as backup.

3. Then I Changed My Mind

So if I want to suck all my blog posts to another WordPress site, I have to setup a domain in another webhosting company.

What about vTiger? The CRM script is the only reason I like Bluehost, especially vTiger installation with SimpleScript. SimpleScript automatically installs most open source scripts without having to do any technical tweaking and SimpleScripts resides only in Bluehost and some other lesser known webhosting companies. If I don’t trust Bluehost, how in the world am I going to trust the lesser known ones.

Ok, let’s move the main site to Hostgator and open a new account on Bluehost just to run vTiger CRM. While registering a new domain on Bluehost, I discovered the Pro Package. For a long time, Bluehost never offered any upgrades. What if I upgrade from the shared hosting account to Pro Package account, so that I don’t have to worry about transferring data to Hostgator? Is the Pro Package really any better?

A search on Google revealed positive feedback and one of them being…
http://www.codemyownroad.com/upgrading-bluehost-pro/
This review looks genuine enough (these days we have to decipher what’s real and what’s not when it come to reviews).

So let me give it a shot. Upgrade to Bluehost Pro Package account. If it does not work, I will move to Hostgator.

The next step required before pressing the upgrade button is to download the full website in zip format complete with files, database, email forwarders and configuration setting. 11 GB in total.

Read tomorrow’s post about the upgrading process. I am leaving the computer turned on overnight for the massive download.

Adrian Lee
http://AdrianVideoImage.com