How-To: Migrate From BlueHost To SiteGround
3 min read
I had BinaryBlogger.com hosted with BlueHost with around 3 years and recently moved it off to another hosting provider. The priamry reason was the decreasing performance of the load times, continual issues and clunky administration features. I did research, read reviews and chose to move my blog to SiteGround. The biggest decision for my move was a package they offered. For a few dollars more a month I was paying at BlueHost I could get unlimited websites on one account. That allowed me to spin off my securityinfive.com domain into it’s own site and keep binaryblogger.com and manage them from one hosting account. BlueHost has the same packages but they highlight ‘Standard Performance’ and that’s what I had on my singular package and it sucked.
The biggest challegenge was how to move a WordPress site with years of posts, settings, tweaks, updates and customizations and not use anything. SiteGorund had the answer, their own WordPress migrator.
I created my account with SiteGround and installed the SiteGround WordPress Migrator on my original site. I set it up per their easy instructions which was simply entering a token from SiteGround. I was skeptical but the migrator worked flawlessly. It brought over the entire database, which was over a GB in size, and my blog was 100% intact.
The only thing left to do was swing my domain, binaryblogger.com, over to SiteGround’s DNS and presto migrated. That’s it. I even reached out to SiteGround customer service chat to confirm traffic was indeed gong to them and not BlueHost anymore. After I did that, I moved on to creating the second site.
My second domain securityinfive.com was setup as a parked domain redirecting to binaryblogger.com. I had the domain to make sure I had the name but hadn’t setup a seperate site for it yet. Now that I could break it away I setup a second WordPress install in SiteGround. That was as easy as going into the cPanel and clicking WordPress Install. I filled out the forms to setup an Addon Domain on my account and installed securityinfive.com.
I then switched the DNS settings on the domain name through my registrar to point to SiteGround and done. Easy.
The last part was a little trickier to do. Securityinfive.com was up and running but there was no content. All my podcast related posts were in my binaryblogger.com blog and I had to get them out and into securityinfive.com. The challenge was there are over 500 posts.
In binaryblogger.com I used the built-in WordPress exporter. Luckily my use of post tags allowed me to export by category. The export is to an XML file which the new WordPress blog can easily import. However when I first did it all my HTML code was goofed and the embedded podcast player broke, in all 500 posts.
So I cracked open Notepad++ and got to editing XML. I worked on one entry and fixed the HTML code then Find/Replaced the rest and all posts were loaded perfectly. Whew.
The point of this post is that complicated things are only complicated on the surface. Once you look into it and read through the steps, anyone can do these types of things. I moved a large WordPress DB between to hosting sites, moved two domains, created a new blog, and aside from the XML editing didn’t take any deep technical skills.
If you have a blog on a free host or a host that you are not happy with you are not locked to them. There are always soltuions, many far easier than you think, that can get you into a situation that better fits your requirements.
End of line.
Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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