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.

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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.

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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.

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