What affordable/reliable hosting to migrate from Bluehost WordPress sites?

Hi there, I am thinking about namecheap since they show the process is easy using CPanel: https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/9539/2199/how-to-transfer-from-bluehost

but I am sure this won't be that easy and the WP sites may break?

can you please recommend from your experience a reliable hosting provider that was easy and secure to make this migration?

thanks in advance

 

Hi there,

in case you are able to download the database / save a backup copy and access all the files you can basically switch to any kind of hosting. Wordpress sites are fairly easy to move if you know what you do and there are plenty tutorials on how to do it.
So without knowledge restrictions I's go with a fair priced provider, in case you do not want to move the site yourself, consider hiring a freelancer vs. finding a host with an easy transfer setup.

 

I use Siteground, but they are not the cheapest alternative.
They help clients and provide free website migration over to them.

 

yes, namecheap also does this free migration service, I should have taken their big deals in past black friday...

 

Why will it break?
Moving any site, wp or otherwise, has only 2 steps:
1. download and import the database.
2. Download and upload php/html etc files to new host.

You can do both these manually, very easy work.

In case you are using cpanel, keep one thing in mind, that is, make sure that your "username" is same on both hosting, or else database connection to newly imported database will fail.
This is really not a problem if you can change one variable in your wp config.php file, by opening it in notepad etc.

When you will take a dump using cpanel of old database, the database name also gets exported, like "user_wp1"
When you will import this file to another host using cpanel itself, it will create a new database like this: "newuser_user_wp1" (if old username and new username are different)

Your wp will try to make connection to old name (that is the name in config file), "user_wp1"
That database is not present, so connection will fail.

Open wp config file in notepad, look for the variable of database_name, database_user, database_password,
and change to your new ones, and you are done.