WP Migration Adventure and 100% Success - Very easy and complete.

[Lumos]

I bought an already made WP site and domain that is very well set up and already populated with lots of stuff;
Trouble is, it came with its hosting at godaddy - which just totally sucks.

Not only is it dead slow - but in trying to get a cPanel backup to move it to better hosting, the backup file was corrupted every time.
This was attempted by me as well as the new provider who does migrations at no extra charge - both with the same results.
(Other providers suck in pretty much the same ways too - they try to hold users and their data hostage, I learned this the hard way...)

I was really stuck because the hosting paid period was ending very soon and I sure didn't want to have all that goodness vanish - nor am I willing to pay godaddy even 5 cents if I can avoid it.

In checking what options might help me I once again ran across Migrate Guru, which I'd read about, but never used before.

Its a free WP plugin and has a writeup here:

Code:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/migrate-guru/

All it requires is to install it at the source site, and enter the credentials it needs to work with.

For folks with a destination hosting provider listed in it this should be very easy;
For me it was a little less easy just because of moving from a cPanel based hosting to a non-listed DirectAdmin based hosting.
So I had to set it up to use FTP instead.

Since it is not possible to have one domain in 2 places at the same time, I got another (free) domain to accept the transferred data.
The source is a .com - and the destination is a .ml of the same name.
After this is done and verified I will have the hosting provider change the domain on that account and it'll be exactly like it was before.

Steps involved for the whole migration process:
1. Get the new domain name;
2. Set it pointing to the hosting via DNS management - might need propagation time, using Freenom DNS this comes through very, very fast;
3. Make the hosting account for that new domain;
4. Create the needed FTP account;
5. Install Wordpress into /public_html (making note of the settings, etc...)
6. Enter the needed info into Migrate Guru at the source (admin=>plugins...);

Side note:
For me, getting the credentials just right was fiddly and it worked best using the IP address for the destination rather than its URL and the FTP username needed to be formatted like user@domain.ml

7. As soon as the correct info works, Migrate Guru starts and opens a progress page which is quite impressive and works very well.

For it to migrate and adjust this over 2GB site took about 40 minutes altogether after it began and I suspect that with better hosting than godaddy it would have taken alot less time to complete.
(I may be wrong about this too as the site has over 39000 files...)

As things in the world of WP go - this was painless and very easy IMO.
Given that it was done between 2 totally different types of hosting controls - I must say that I am very impressed

A possible close 2nd (if this hadn't worked...) :
Namecheap does WP migrations to their own hosting for no additional charges.
Details here:
https://www.namecheap.com/migrate-wordpress/
https://www.namecheap.com/wordpress/
And their 10GB deal is $3.88/month.
So what I'd do is get it migrated away from sucky godaddy and keep it at Namecheap for as short a time as possible - then migrate it to my own hosting ASAP.

This was a truly great experience and I highly recommend using that Migrate Guru plugin - and doubly so as I've tried other methods before and this was way easier and just worked immediately.

[Lumos]

If anyone here also uses this - please reply with how it worked out for you ??

[ilikeseggs]

Nice share Smith. We've all been there for some reason or another. Always good to hear of the newest working tools/techniques.

[JesseJames]

You always share cool findings smithnowt. Thank you.

[Lumos]

What I posted in the OP still remains true - and I used it again with equally great results, very easily.
.
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[dynasty5]

Nice find Smithnowt...Thanks and reps