Are you moving or cloning your site to the same or a different domain? You can do it without downtime between hostings, without cPanel (or Plesk) installed, and without FTP skills. No FTP account is necessary to make the migration.
Save money when migrating your site. Don’t pay hosting fees for moving or for any premium plugin.
Requirements: Your new hosting company needs to give you one dedicated IP address on your new hosting plan. You can also get it with an Amazon LightSail plan or another hosting plan, such as Contabo (if you buy a VPS plan) or Digital Ocean if they can do it. This IP address can be used to install WordPress and view the website’s content before you change the DNS and the DNS propagation. Follow these steps:
Do not cancel an existing web hosting plan before the move is complete. At this point, stop making changes to your site until the install is finished, and your new site is working fine.
Buy a hosting plan with one dedicated IP address.
Buy an S3 Object storage plan from Amazon. After the migration, you can keep your object storage for your backups, load your images, or just cancel it.
When installing WordPress on the new hosting, remember: Prefix matters. Also, note the prefix assigned to each database on the old hosting. In case of discrepancies (e.g., “jdoe_wordpress” vs. “jd_wordpress”), the prefixes will need to be changed in the configuration file of each software application that connects to that database. You can find that information in this file: wp-config.php in your root folder (look for $table_prefix = …).
Go to your current site and install these free plugins:
a) Database Backup
b) ToolsforS3 (to use Amazon object storage)
Copy these files and folders to your object storage with our plugin above:
a) wp-config (use the ToolsForS3 plugin)
b) wp-content (use the ToolsForS3 plugin)
c) Database Backup (use the Database Backup plugin)
Install WordPress on your new hosting using your new IP.
Restore from your cloud object these folders:
a) wp-content (use the Tools for S3 plugin)
b) Database Backup (use the Database Backup plugin). Before restoring, make a backup of the old one.
c) Use the free BigDump Restore free plugin to restore your database.
Don’t forget to set up your email accounts if you have any. You can use the free Thunderbird to download your emails to your local computer.
Test your new site by putting the IP address in your browser. If it works fine, go to your domain registrar and change your domain DNS to the new hosting. Each registrar has a different procedure, but you can find details on their documentation and support page.
Wait for the propagation. The transfer of DNS servers between the old and new web hosts can take between 12 to 72 hours after the request for such a change is submitted to the new registrar. But no problem because your old hosting is online. Visitors to the website will still be able to access the website through the old hosting while the DNS propagation takes place.
After propagation is done, use the free plugin Easy UPDATE URLs to update on your database any URLs that may still be pointing to the old domain or to IP address.
If you’re running short on time, let us take care of the job for you.
Install on Amazon Standard Hosting
