I recently made the decision to switch from Bluehost to SiteGround for my websites. Since I had never done anything similar before, I was really anxious about doing it, but it turned out to be a fairly straightforward process. For those of you who are wondering if moving a website from BlueHost to SiteGround is difficult, I made the decision to develop a tutorial.
Why I opted for SiteGround instead of Bluehost?
You can skip this section if you’d like, but I wanted to explain why I switched from Bluehost to SiteGround for my hosting needs. One of the least expensive places to start a blog is Bluehost, and I’ve been quite happy with them, however recently I wanted to add SLL certification to one of my blogs.
I looked into the least expensive method for doing this and discovered that Let’s Encrypt provides free SSL certificates. However, I would need to pay a monthly subscription for a dedicated IP in order to use this with BlueHost. Even then, using Let’s Encrypt with Bluehost did not sound like the simplest procedure.
I’ve heard fantastic things about SiteGround from a blogging group I belong to, so when I discovered that SiteGround provided simple Let’s Encrypt connection, I made the decision to move.
Additionally, their Grow Big plan featured an SSL Wildcard for free for a year and was more affordable** than the Plus Hosting Plan from Bluehost, which I was currently paying for. As a result, I would spend less than before while maintaining my required SSL certification.
Website Transfer from Bluehost to SiteGround
- Begin by creating a SiteGround account.
One website transfer will be provided for FREE with your new account. And now for some good news. They will migrate every website you have under a single control panel for free if you have more than one. I used BlueHost to host three websites.
- Select “Transfer Website” under the Support tab in your SiteGround account.
- Complete the transfer form on the website.
Select cPanel as the hosting control panel to manage your new account. You’ll also need the URL for your Bluehost control panel, so open your control panel and copy the URL from there. You’ll also need your Bluehost username and password, of course.
A brief conversation with SiteGround technical support helped me to understand what to enter in the other fields because I was a bit unsure. What should I put in the “other information” section where they ask for mySQL and PHPMyAdmin information was my biggest concern. It turns out that I didn’t need to add anything, but I did ask that all three of my websites be transferred here.
- Submit your ticket, then wait for a response.
I had to wait for a while. While you wait, you can check the status of your ticket on SiteGround (under the Support tab). Here is where I found some difficulty. When SiteGround responded, they informed me that a full backup couldn’t be performed because Bluehost had made certain changes. They advised me to get in touch with Bluehost to handle this for me. If not, they claimed it would take a long time and they could only create one website for me without charge. Each of the other websites would cost $30.