Simple, Quick Migrations And Our Path To WP Engine

For me, and really all web developers, web hosting has always been a need, not a want. I have a technical background and have been using Linux on and off for decades–literally decades. I’ve always thought that hosting is a simple concept, and it is, but growing a business, building killer websites, and making sure 150 clients are happy with their hosting isn’t easy.

Equally difficult is migrating sites from one provider to another–it’s time consuming, complex, and can sometimes be costly. Throughout the years, my agency, Sideways8, has migrated WordPress sites between providers a few times. Each time, the migration came with its unique set of headaches. There was the time the migration failed just before completion. There was the time migrating off of a dedicated server took a year–yes, you read that correctly, A YEAR! We’ve experienced first hand the hassles of site migrations.

But, recently, we tried out WP Engine Automated Migration, a new plugin WP Engine has made available that migrates existing WordPress sites to the WP Engine platform for free. We can now migrate an existing WordPress site to the WP Engine platform quickly and easily with just a few steps and a few clicks. It saves a tremendous amount of time and energy when migrating WordPress sites.

To better illustrate the power of smooth and seamless migrations, let me dig a little bit into our path to WP Engine.

How We Got Here

My business partner and I started hosting sites for our clients in 2008. At that point they were very small clients without many needs. Basically, the sites were five-page brochure sites–there was no blog, no features. A simple reseller account that allowed us to add as many clients we wanted to was perfect for us.

But three years in we realized we needed a better solution. What if one of the bigger sites we built were featured on Good Morning America? We wanted to be proactive, so we setup a VPS with a hosting company that the WordPress community recommended. If we needed more resources, we can just go up to the next tier. That sounded like a great option.

WordPress is great, but the combination of things that happened next caused us to lose one of our clients. One of the sites on the VPS got stuck on an infinite loop causing the VPS to use more resources than allocated. WordPress was using so many resources that the technical support team said we had no option but to bypass all of their tiered VPSs offerings and go directly to a dedicated server. We were told that migration would take four or five hours.

Four or five hours later, however, the migration failed. Normally, that wouldn’t have been too huge of a problem, but it was 5:30 p.m. on a Friday and the technical support team that deals with the migrations does not work on weekends. Support would not spin up our VPS no matter what we requested. It was a simple problem that we could have fixed, and their support could have fixed it if they understood WordPress.

From 10:30 a.m. on a Friday until Monday afternoon, we had a server down because of one site that was a resource hog. We decided to leave that hosting company and found a hosting company that gave us scalable VPSs, and 24/7 technical support for every possible level needed. It took us a year to migrate our sites from the dedicated server. When you are building custom WordPress themes and plugins, who has time to migrate clients to another server?

With a VPS we have our own slew of problems. We aren’t interested in making sure Apache is configured correctly, or that Exim isn’t spamming people, etc. We don’t have time to make sure we have all of the security plugins installed and up to date.

Eventually we found WP Engine. We didn’t want to not have to worry about hosting at all, so it was worth paying a little more. We wanted to be able to build sites, launch them, and know that they are backed up automatically every 24 hours. We also didn’t want to have to migrate all of our sites again.

We went with the Professional plan, and used it for about a year before realizing that I really didn’t have to worry about the sites as much as I did with other hosting companies. Recently, we took the plunge and are moving all of our sites to a Premium plan with WP Engine. With WP Engine Automated Migration, that move should be a breeze.

Aaron is a designer turned developer turned an agency starter. He was been working with WordPress since 2008. He has worked on WordPress projects with companies ranging from Fortune 100 companies to the local sewing machine shop. He regularly speaks at Meetups and WordCamps and currently helps lead the Atlanta WordPress Meetup.