Migrating WordPress Manually

Migrating a WordPress website from your former provider to MDDHosting can be a relatively straightforward process, but there are several steps you will need to follow in order to do it successfully. In this article, we will walk you through each of the steps involved in the migration process, so you can get your website up and running on your account with us as quickly and easily as possible.

  1. First, you will need to make a backup of your WordPress website. This will ensure that you have a copy of all of your website’s files and data, in case anything goes wrong during the migration process. You can create a backup of your website using the built-in backup tools in your former provider’s control panel, or by using a WordPress plugin like UpdraftPlus.

  2. Once you have a backup of your website, you will need to download it to your local computer. This will allow you to access the files and data needed for the migration process.

  3. Next, you will need to upload your WordPress website’s files to your account with us. This will include all of the files and folders that make up your website, such as your theme, plugins, and media files. You can do this using an FTP client like FileZilla, or by using the File Manager in your cPanel control panel.

  4. After your website’s files have been uploaded to your account, you will need to create a new database. This will be where your WordPress website’s data will be stored once the migration is complete. You can easily create a new database using the “MySQL” section of your cPanel control panel.  We suggest using the “MySQL Wizard” to create a database and associated username and noting those details when you create it.

  5. Once you have created a new database, you can restore your WordPress website’s data into it using the “Backups” section of cPanel or by using phpMyAdmin in the cPanel. This will allow your website to access the data it needs to function properly.

  6. Finally, you will need to update the database connection details in your WordPress website’s “wp-config.php” file to point to the new database. This will allow your website to access the data it needs to function properly.

Once you have completed all of these steps, your WordPress website should be fully migrated to your new MDDHosting account. You can then test your website to ensure that it is functioning properly, and make any necessary adjustments to get it up and running smoothly.

Please keep in mind that we are always happy to assist you in migrating websites to our services to the best of our abilities.  Don’t hesitate to reach out for help!

Optimizing WordPress for Performance

Building on last week’s topic of how many visitors a hosting plan can handle is this week’s post: Optimizing WordPress for Performance. Even with the highest quality hosting and the most optimized and performant MySQL/MariaDB server poor content and database optimization can still bite you.

I am going to share with you some of the optimizations we have found that have helped our clients do more with less faster. Your results may vary and it is suggested that you take a full backup of your site, both files and database, before you make any changes.

If you are a client of ours and would like us to take a look at your WordPress site(s) please don’t hesitate to reach out. We perform optimization on a regular basis for our clients at no additional charge and we are happy to help as much a we can.

Continue reading “Optimizing WordPress for Performance”

How many visitors can my account handle?!?!?

Long Exposure of Vehicles Traveling at Night

Quite often our clients and potential clients ask us a question that on its face seems simple: How many visitors can my account handle? This question is not as simple as it seems.

As with any deceptively simple question there is more to it than a simple number. We wish we could simply give a number as a response but to do so would be disingenuous and deceptive from our perspective. We know that there is far more to the question and the answer than a simple number.

If all sites were created equal and all sites used the same amount of resources per visit, transmitted the same amount of data, performed the same SQL queries, etc – the answer would be simple. In the real world every website is different. We have some clients that are handling more than 100,000 visitors per month on our cheapest and least-powerful plans and then we have other clients on our most powerful and most expensive plans that are struggling with only a few thousand.

We don’t want to make what seems like a promise – that you can hit a particular number of monthly visitors – when it’s not something we can guarantee as we do not control your content or applications.

Continue reading “How many visitors can my account handle?!?!?”

The history of MDDHosting

The Beginning.

I always wanted to start my own web host and the earliest I remember having that desire was in 1998 when I was still in middle school. I had written my own web server software and already had a solid grasp of the protocols of the time. Being young and still in school this got put on the back burner for nearly a decade.

Fast forward to 2007 when I was looking for reliable hosting for one of my own projects and having significant trouble finding a provider I felt that I could trust. This was even before EIG, or Endurance International Group (now called Newfold Digital), had swallowed up all of the common providers. Many of the larger providers were still independent and providing decent but not amazing services.

My decision process came down to Site5 and HostGator at the time, both of which are now owned by Newfold Digital. I will be straightforward in that I honestly don’t remember what leaned me towards HostGator over Site5 but that is where I ended up. Having wanted to start my own provider for nearly a decade at this point I went for a reseller plan with HostGator.

The service overall was ok but not anything I’d consider spectacular. The long and short of it was that the server I was placed on was so hopelessly overloaded that important system wide processes like Apache or Named would crash. Over the first couple of weeks I saw several outages of 1 to 4 hours as services on the server would crash and it would take time for support to fix the issues. There was no way I could reasonably and truthfully recommend my own services to anyone else based upon a HostGator reseller account.

Continue reading “The history of MDDHosting”

Troubleshooting most WordPress Issues

The vast majority of support requests we receive are either about WordPress or email. This is not entirely surprising as most of our clients run WordPress sites and most also use our email services.

We are always happy to help so please do not hesitate to reach out to our support if you are having issues with your site. At minimum we can point you in the right direction and in most cases we are able to identify and resolve the issues our clients are facing even if they are not server or network level. Most issues we solve are content based but we are still happy to help!

From our experience the most common issues here lately are due to the WordPress core or Plugins updating and not supporting the version of PHP an account is set to. We just now solved an issue for a client where they were getting the “There has been a critical error on your website. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions,” message.

In this case, and many others, we don’t generally have access to the administration email for the site so we simply enable WordPress Debugging. The process for this is fairly straightforward.

  1. Using your favorite method for editing files – be it the File Manager in your control panel or downloading the file via FTP and editing it locally – open up your “wp-config.php” file. This file is located in the base folder of your WordPress Installation.
  2. Inside of the WordPress Configuration file you will generally find a line like the one just below and you will want to change “false” to “true”:
define( 'WP_DEBUG', false );
  1. Reload the website and/or reproduce the error. In many cases you will get get a verbose error that tells you which file is having the issue. You can usually identify the plugin or theme causing the issue based upon the error.

In the instance from just before writing this post the error we were seeing was:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '?', expecting variable (T_VARIABLE) in /home/redacted/public_html/wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/vendor/symfony/polyfill-php80/bootstrap.php on line 29

So in this case the issue is with the WooCommerce plugin. When looking at line 29 of the referenced file we saw nothing wrong although the syntax for this line is not compatible with any version of PHP older than 7.4:

function str_contains(?string $haystack, ?string $needle): bool { return p\Php80::str_contains($haystack ?? '', $needle ?? ''); }

As there was nothing obviously wrong with this line of code – the line is intact with no obvious errors we suspected the PHP version may be at fault.

We checked the version of PHP the account was assigned to and found it on version 7.0. Moving the account to version 7.4 or newer resolved the issue and allowed the site to function as expected.

It’s very common for automatic updates, or even manual ones, to update a plugin, theme, or even the core installation to a version that does not support older versions of PHP. This is but just one example but most issues share the same initial troubleshooting steps.

Steps that you may take to investigate the issue would be to set a default theme, to disable plugins, or to even roll back the installation to a backup from when the site was known to be functioning. We do suggest taking a current backup before doing that.

If you ever have issues with your WordPress site, or any site you host with us, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support for assistance. We have decades of experience when it comes to investigating and troubleshooting issues with websites and while we can’t make promises that we will resolve your issues we’ll do our absolute best!

Love Our Services? Refer-A-Friend to Us and Get Rewarded!

Since our inception in 2007 MDDHosting has always relied mainly on word-of-mouth referrals of satisfied users to gain new clients. Unlike most of the other hosting providers, we do not allocate much budget to marketing and advertisements but instead we choose to reinvest our profits back into our infrastructure and services to provide the best hosting services for our clients.

As a token of our appreciation to all our loyal clients, we have just launched a new Refer-A-Friend program to reward any clients who refer one or more friends to sign up with us.

You can find your unique link to share among your friends in your client area homepage. When someone successfully signs up for our services for the first time after clicking your link and maintains that service for at least 30 days, your MDDHosting account will be credited with account credits which can be used to pay for your existing services.

We are offering a $25 credit every successful referral so the upcoming holiday season should be a good time to start casually mentioning about your hosting provider during your friends and families gatherings. 😉

How is this different from the Affiliate Program?

Our Affiliate Program is open to all while the Refer-A-Friend program is reserved exclusively for MDDHosting clients only.

Affiliate commissions can be paid via Account Credit or PayPal with a minimum required commission value of $250 while the referred credits of the Refer-A-Friend program is paid into your Account Credit with no minimums.

You can enroll into both our Affiliate Program and Refer-A-Friend program as we do not force you to choose one or the other. You will have two different set of unique referral links in such a situation so you will need to determine which of the two to give out.

Continue reading “Love Our Services? Refer-A-Friend to Us and Get Rewarded!”

Introducing the New Cloud Hosting & Elastic Reseller Hosting

Over the past year we have embarked on a plan to revamp our Cloud Hosting and Reseller Hosting plans to respond to changes in market demand and we are happy to say the new plans are now available.

New Cloud Hosting Plans

The last time we revamped our hosting plans was back in 2018 where we introduced nine Cloud plans from the CloudStarter plan all the way to the Cloud14 plan.

Since then we noticed a few problems with the plans:

  • Prospective clients are confused by the large number of plans and are unsure of which to go with.
  • Clients who decided on a Cloud plan rarely, if ever change to a different Cloud plan.
  • Many clients went with the lower plans which are no longer powerful enough to cater to the growing demands of modern website technologies and plugins.

We decided to slim down the number of Cloud plans down to three – Turbo, Plaid and Plaid+.

We’ve Gone to Plaid!

The major highlights of our new Cloud Hosting are the Plaid and Plaid+ plans which are up to 5x faster than the Turbo plan as well as the previous Cloud plans. The Plaid and Plaid+ plans are powered by our brand new highly available Cloud infrastructure with high speed AMD EPYC™ processors, high speed DDR4 3200 RAM and high speed NVMe Storage.

The Plaid is our recommended plan for anyone who wants give your website a speed boost and it is great for eCommerce websites with 5x faster in disk writing speed and 3x faster in MySQL database queries based on our most recent internal tests.

If you have a demanding or high traffic website that requires more than 4 CPU Cores and 4 GB of RAM, the Plaid+ plan with 8 CPU Cores and 8 GB RAM is designed with your use case in mind. It has the same fast speed as the Plaid plan while doubling the CPU and RAM allocations to cater to your growing needs.

New Elastic Reseller Hosting

We have also revamped our Reseller Hosting plans to give resellers more flexibility on how you want to run your business.

The new Elastic Reseller Hosting has two new features:

Resource Pool

You are allocated with a resource pool of CPU and RAM for your whole reseller account and you can decide how to allocate this to your cPanel accounts as you see fit. What this means is you can allocate more CPU for your more demanding or higher paying clients and less CPU for the rest.

We believe that this is a much better way to allocate CPU and RAM compared to the previous Reseller plans which has a rigid limit of 1 CPU Core for each cPanel account.

You can oversell your CPU and RAM allocations just like the Disk Space and Bandwidth limits for increased efficiency. For example, while you are allocated with 15 CPU Cores with the Elastic 15 plan, you can create 30 cPanel accounts each with 2 CPU Cores but your total CPU usage will not exceed 15 CPU Cores.

It is worth pointing out that most websites have very low usages so the risk of your accounts maxing out your limit is quite low as all of them will need to be using a lot of CPU at the exact same time to max out your limit. You can always upgrade to a higher Elastic Reseller Hosting plan at anytime in our self-service Client Area as your needs grow.

Automatic Account, Disk Space & Bandwidth Scaling

Reseller Hosting is finally elastic where you can create as many cPanel accounts and use as much Disk Space as well as Bandwidth as you need without having to upgrade to a higher plan.

Our system will intelligently detect the amount of cPanel Accounts, Disk Space and Bandwidth that your Elastic Reseller Hosting account is using and bill the additional usages accordingly.

We only offer the Elastic Reseller Hosting plans with the Monthly billing cycle only as a result of the new usage-based billing model so reseller clients will not be overburdened by these additional charges being accumulated over a long period of time.

With great flexibility comes great responsibilities as well so if you do plan to switch to the new Elastic Reseller Hosting plans, we highly recommend that you set hard and realistic limits on the Disk Space and Bandwidth offered to your clients so you will not experience a bill shock if one or more of your clients decided to use more Disk Space or Bandwidth than you expected.

If you are happy with your existing plan, you do not have to change and you can stay on your current plan and pricing for as long as you like.

If you are excited to give the new plans a try or if you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch or discuss the new plans in our Customer Community Discord.

Summer Specials 2021!

With the pandemic showing signs of reprieve globally and as the world marches towards reopening, we believe that it is now the right time to launch our Summer Specials with discounts of up to 60%!

The promo codes below are valid for new MDDHosting clients only and they will be active until August 31st, 2021.

60% OFF promo code for Monthly billing cycle:

SUMMER60


10% OFF promo code for all other billing cycles:

SUMMER10

If you are an existing client of MDDHosting, we have something for you as well!

Please do make sure that you’ve joined our mailing list to receive details about the Summer Specials we are running for existing clients.

If you have not joined our mailing list, you can do so under the My Details page of our Client Area.

Have a nice summer everyone!

* Valid for new MDDHosting clients only.
* Valid for Cloud Hosting & Reseller Hosting only.
* Offer turns into a pumpkin after October 31st, 2020.

Client Discord Server

We’ve opened a community discord server and everyone is welcome!

This discord server will give our clients direct communication with each other, should they desire, as well as direct and real-time communication with our staff.

As our discord community grows our clients can help each other out and all clients will have an avenue for direct real-time communication with our staff.

Join the MDDHosting Customer Community discord server today!