I have been on the internet and with websites since March 1995 and blogging since May 2005. I started small with local hosting platforms, and then expanded each to a point where I consolidated all my sites and blogs to a super dedicated server in May 2007. By 2012 I began to downsize and broke up my dedicated server into 5 separate and smal and cheaper shared hosting accounts … one at BLUEHOST (affiliate link) and four at HOSTGATOR (affiliate link). Both Bluehost and Hostgator (and a bunch of other hosting companies) are all owned by the same “Endurance International Group” and that always irked me.

My Bluehost server holds about 20-25% of my sites, and expires July 29, 2016 but I decided to move all my sites to Canadian servers when one of the sites had a little traffic this month and Bluehost deactivated my account. It turned out to be an old plugin I had (Spam Karma 2) that I never removed that was causing the problems and my account was reactivated right away – but, with the US Exchange rate rising .. I finally decided to move my sites back to a Canadian Hosted server. My Hostgator sites are not renewed until December 31, 2016 so I plan to just move those over the fall at the convenience of my time.

SKGOLD HOSTING aka CANADIAN WEB HOSTING

After review and talking to various other people I respect, I decided to go with SKGOLD HOSTING (affiliate Link). If you want to read up on the, and considering your own move of servers .. check them out: www.skgoldhosting.com/about.html (no affiliate link)

These are the sites I moved … how are they doing? I notice they are not slow or downtime like they were on Bluehost … but – I just got them migrated today 😀

1800hart.com
1800hart.tv
2yrd.com
62-151.com
abitpac.com
andyouwill.com
andyouwill.net
andyouwill.org
battlingforhealth.com
battlingforhealth.net
battlingforhealth.org
bettesinger.com
callhart.com
hart-empire.com (this site)
hart-empire-network.com
hart-network.com
hartleybsinger.com
hbsmc.com
jmskwared.com
singer-empire.com
singer-network.com
the-singers.com

MIGRATING TO ANOTHER SERVER IS HELL

Migrating to another server is hell .. if you have to do it yourself, or expensive if you have to pay another to do it for you. However, if you have access to the cPanel .. (and especially if you subscribe to a daily backup application like “Site Pro Backup”) the cPanel has an option to make a FULL CPANEL BACKUP. What this does, is creates a backup in a .tar.gz format of all your files, databases, settings, add-ons, and well, everything! that is in your old server, that your new server can come and scoop and download and install into the new server.

For my Bluehost account – it took about 48 hours to get their technical support to finally make a good and full cPanel backup that wasn’t corrupt and was in a compressed mode (which took extra time) and ended up being about 15.13 GB in size. Restoration on the new server took about 4 hours to download in the first place, and that was about midnight … and by 10am this morning most of the sites were up and running.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

I was finding out that when I went to about half of the sites .. I was getting the above message – especially when I tried to log in to the dashboard of my wordpress files to update plugins and such and give a good test.

Here is how to fix this problem:

* Make a backup or in your FTP program rename your .htaccess file to something like .htaccess-before-move-hosting
* Go to SETTINGS.
* Go to PERMALINKS.
* Notice which settings you have – (usually “postname” or “month/name”)
* Choose PLAIN and common settings for Permalinks and SAVE.
* Then, re-select your original “postname” (or whatever) setting and SAVE

That’s pretty much it. What this does is create or overwrite the existing .htaccess file and make it work with the server and site. You should be cautious however, and compare what was created with the .htaccess-before-move-hosting file, to see if you need to add or modify the existing file with extra security and safety features.

Your Welcome!

HART

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image source: Wikipedia