I love AWS, but of late my website has been running like a dog and I’ve noticed that prices have felt like they’re creeping up. Happy to accept that both could be me. But it feels like time to try out a different host. After a lot of digging around I’ve settled on Hostinger. The plan is competitive, they’re UK based and I can host a number of sites in one place.
If this works out ok, it’ll be a game changer!
So I’m starting by spinning up a staging server for thestudybuddy.com to see how it works out, and what resources my site is likely to need.
The set up seems straight forward. I can create a site without having to name a domain, simply a temporary site. A good start as there’s no messing around with DNS (be interesting to see how it works when I do apply a domain to it and WP settings).
Once spun up, there’s a Hostinger panel on the WP admin screens. There are also a few Hostinger plugins – no idea if I’ll want these, will check later.
- First thing to do is the basic site settings – name, tagline, icon, permalinks etc.
- Install Woocommerce. I need this before importing anything. So I’m going to activate it straight off and make sure all the store settings are correct.
- Add the Woocommerce related plugins I need. In my case Square payments, Paypal and Webtoffee’s Sequential Order Number (a must for migrating a store!), Retainful and smart coupons. These all have aspects that I need to make sure are covered by meta and custom fields on import.
- Then activate those plugins. For me, no need to worry about the setting-up of those right now.
- I’m using WP All Import and the add ons for users and woo. I have wasted too much of my life trying to do this without buying plugins. This is a god send. Read the post here on preserving the IDs (although this no longer works for Orders, unfortunately!)
- Next, import my Store from the current host. In order
- Products
- Users (Customers)
- Coupons
- Orders…
- Orders is not straight forward. When you import the orders they are assigned new order IDs. This is absolutely useless when customers are seeing the order numbers and want to refer back to them. That’s why I moved to a sequential order number plugin, to mave the references out of the incremental post IDs of WordPress. The issue now is that WP All Import – and other plugins I guess – didn’t recognise this. So I have had to add a custom field to the export to retain the order number and then assign that back again on import.