For several years one of my clients had been using Dreamhost which provided stable and good performance service. I was approached though as they received email notification from Dreamhost advising that their VPS server would not be granted full access and as result they needed to change hosting.
I did a bit research and found InMotionHosting as a good choice for following reasons:
- full access(root) for VPS, which is the key thing here
- Postgresql database support – the client is planning to roll out their own application which requires PostgreSQL, this is the reason why they want VPS with full access
- good reputation for hosting service
Before I did the actual work, I found out the client doesn’t need VPS for their site so the solution changed to a shared plan (still with PostgreSQL support) which turned out to be a big saving for them.
So the migration started…
The whole migration was surprisingly smooth, just with a few little problems here and there:
- Domain name change: Changing away from Dreamhost is not that straight forward – need to unlock domain, change privacy setting, and find out the “auth code”. Those actions are not on one place so you have to go to several pages, I guess this might be their intent not to make the whole process too easy. (on their page, double click on auth code to copy, by default, the last # would miss out, very annoying as if you don’t notice this, the change will fail due to incorrect code!)
- WordPress change. I first used export/import provided by WordPress. This however cannot import pictures so at the end had to download all “wp-content/upload” folder from Dreamhost and upload to InMotionHosting. Also you’ll need to take note of what plugins are installed on the old site so that you can re-install them on the new site.
- For shared plans, InMotionHosting doesn’t provide SFTP. The only option is to use public key/private while FTP is always enabled.
After migration, I noticed performance seems improved, though I didn’t do further testing. Here are a few notes of some different parts of the two sites:
Price: Dreamhost offers monthly plan while InMotionHosting 1 year at least
Database: InMotionHosting offers PostgreSQL
VPS: InMotionHosting offers full access, while Dreamhost need dedicated server which is far more expensive