If you’ve become unhappy with your website hosting due to outages, increased fees or technical issues, you’re probably asking “when should I switch website hosting companies?” and that answer is not always super simple. It’s obvious that you should NOT move hosting when you’re in the middle of something – like a renewal campaign – or is it? I’ll share two case studies:
About two years ago we took on a new client (a division of another client’s organization) that had outdated “Cpanel” hosting by their former web development company. A few big red flags – the tech person was in central Europe (meaning, they outsourced their tech), the cpanel hosting is more or less been replaced with “managed” website hosting (for WordPress sites) now due to security, stability and speed. But they had a really sweet deal, weren’t all that keen on moving and we weren’t all that keen on adding another big site move to the larger task of getting courses online, which was our contract with them.
Turns out, that was a huge mistake which hampered our efforts to help them and ultimately they chose to just go in a completely different direction with their website and courses! I’m sharing this because I want you to know that this is complex and difficult decisionmaking and you should be prepared for it.
We recently migrated a client from GoDaddy to WPEngine and it was hugely successful for them. In fact, the site was moved in ONE hour. We had attempted, previous 6 weeks to launch their major renewal membership campaign and kept having issues with client payments failing. Turns out, GoDaddy’s internal firewall was flagging the client’s PayPal payment integration as suspicious. Despite many calls and tech tickets, GoDaddy could not solve this. The client asked us to move the hosting, and at first we were hesitant – they were in the middle of a renewal push! But remembering our other, poor experience – we decided to push ahead.
The migration was one of the most simple, easiest ones we’ve ever done (they continue to get easier and easier!) though it did require us to pause renewals for the period of time we were doing the migration.
We have also migrated clients during times of security issues, and that is, in fact, why we do NOT recommend Cpanel hosting any longer. The risks on those platforms are greater than on managed hosting platforms and many cpanel hosting is done in a shared server environment making other people’s bad decisions YOUR problem later on.
To migrate during a not-so-optimum time:
- communicate with the client and their customers that a certain major function of their website (registration, membership etc.) will be down for the day it takes to do the migration – though the website will remain up. Emphasize security and performance as the goal.
- Use a quality migration system (Flywheel and WP Engine have these plugins) or use a plugin specifically for migration and staging. We like WPStaging.
- Pause, remove links to registration pages and back up sites before migrating
- Be prepared to be “down” for 24 hours on major systems (the site will be up but you should not be taking orders, processing memberships, hosting classes or anything else)
- Once migration is complete, test, test test!
Ultimately the second client in our example above (and many others before them) benefited greatly from moving hosting. In retrospect we’d have recommended we pause all development on our first client example’s site until they agreed to migrate. In the end, they chose to move off of the platforms they’d had for a while (including the courseware system) and chose another development firm to develop that. I had a feeling it would come to that, and I don’t regret that move as they were a challenging client to work with – I only regret I didn’t insist harder we get buy in on that migration from the beginning. I now start every conversation with “GoDaddy is fine for small sites but…” or “Cpanel hosting is outdated and we would require managed WordPress hosting instead.”
In the end, moving to quality hosting for mission-critical operations is best-practice for any web developer (and their clients). More stability means less work on the dev side, and no excuses about why it’s slow/not responding/having issues with performance and editing. Moving means fewer issues with security and it’s fallout.