Moving to a new managed WordPress hosting vendor is not an undertaking one should take lightly. I wrote today in my company blog some of the reasons that made me to make that move. One was the cost and one was the fact that I believe that the previous hosting provider WPEngine was not really a good fit for my small management consulting practice. I spent some time contemplating on this move and the final push was when I had to implement SSL for a shopping cart in my educational site TELLUSAcademy.com. The final push was when I was not able to implement SSL without upgrading and doubling my monthly subscription with WPEngine. After some research on the available options I ended up with the new Godaddy.com Managed WordPress hosting with the Business plan.

The move could not have been easier. The only thing I had to do is to point to the URL where I wanted to move site from (www.tellusacademy.com), provide the WordPress admin user name and password and then provide the FTP host location with FTP user name and password. That’s it. I did initially have issues as I did not read the text on the screen where it said clearly that one has to deactivate any custom login plugins (which I have) and once I realized this, I was able to move my site and let Godaddy.com do the work for me. The management portal in Godaddy.com environment is very clean with every site that is under my management can be easily accessed in following way:

If one selects the “manage” button, it goes directly to the WordPress site in admin mode. The button “Settings” lets one change some important settings:

What I really like in this management portal is that I can get directly to all of my sites and change/manage all of the most important settings. The only additional  thing that I had to do was to  create a CNAME (alias) to enable people to get to the site when they enter “www” as part of the URL. That’s it.

It is almost scary how easy it is now to move from one hosting site to the other and this is of course the way it should be. I also explained in my previous blog entry that I believe that the market is changing rapidly and I have to admit that Godaddy.com was not one that I would have selected for WordPress hosting a couple of years ago.

This case is a good example of market changes where a company that one might have ignored in the past have a comeback with a service that is  at least “good enough”  and will gain market share with pricing and other criteria that former players do not have. Godaddy.com is a pretty sizable company so they can price their service in a way that is compelling to organizations such us mine. I have to say though that so far everything has been very smooth, my sites are much faster than before and now my TELLUSAcademy.com site has the needed SSL for shopping cart functions.