Update September 2015 — When possible, and since soon after we published this blog post, GoatCloud no longer uses GoDaddy for hosting. We provide reliable, affordable website hosting. Click here to learn more about our website and email hosting services.

To save substantial money (more than half my hosting fees), in July 2012 I migrated five sites from individual GoDaddy economy hosting accounts to one GoDaddy ultimate hosting account. The process was relatively painless and GoDaddy personnel helped me through at various times. (Actually, they were incredibly helpful and pleasant as always.) In a nutshell, here’s the process (it work work migrating to the somewhat cheaper GoDaddy deluxe hosting as well). It is recommended to read all items before starting with any.  Attempt at your own risk. WordPress or GoDaddy may change their processes at any time.

  1. Back up your WordPress MySQL database using GoDaddy control panels on the GoDaddy site. Download the sql file to your computer.
  2. Back up all website files to your computer using an FTP like FileZilla.
  3. Establish a primary domain in your new Ultimate hosting account.
  4. Create as many additional domains (with a “dev” prefix – assuming you’re not already using “dev” as a subdomain for existing domains) in your new hosting account as you are migrating. For example, let’s say you are migrating account1.com and account2.com. Create two new domains, dev.account1.com and dev.account2.com. You will want to create a new folder for each, such as “account1” and “account2”.
  5. Create as many databases as you have migrating websites. Give each a name sufficient to identify it as corresponding to the appropriate website.
  6. Restore or import the each backed up WordPress database into the corresponding new database.
  7. Using an FTP client, copy the files of each website into their respective folders.
  8. Modify the wp-config.php files of each website so that they contain the new and correct MySQL database information. See this page for details: https://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php.
  9. Cancel your old hosting accounts. It will take some time for them to be cancelled.
  10. Once the old accounts are cancelled, create new domains in the Ultimate hosting account, giving them the names of the old accounts (e.g., account1.com, account2.com). Point these new domains to the relevant folders created at step 4 above.
  11. Delete the “dev” domains. You won’t need them.
  12. Give the new domains time to propagate. It could take a half hour, or could take up to 48 hours. In my case, my sites were down for approximately 1 to 1.5 hours each. So you may want to begin step 9 at a time when you know traffic to your site is low.
  13. Once the migrated domains are active, check them to make sure that all the files transferred successfully. Minimal tweaking may be needed.
  14. You will be able to use the same WordPress log-in user name and password as you did prior to the migration.
  15. Happy money saving!

Or, you could potentially save more time, money, and aggravation by allowing us to host and manage your WordPress site for you!

We can help you to migrate your website from one host to another, including to GoatCloud.

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