If you’ve got a little bit of technical know-how then you’ll be able to do the Your Jobs easily enough and I can do the bits I need to do for a fee of £35 (which might change in the future as I find out how hard/easy that is to do).

Alternatively – for £50 (plus travel if it’s outside of Bristol) I could visit you and we will work on your computer together to make sure all the email bits and bobs get migrated across smoothly. In that case you don’t even need to read this page – as I’ll be walking you through it or doing it for/with you!

Here I’m going to outline the process of migrating a WordPress site from a standalone installation of WordPress, probably on one of my Simple Shared Hosting packages, to my Managed WordPress Hosting. I’ll outline the process that I follow and some of my jobs and what you will need to do.

My Migration Process (note to self!)

1. Backup your old site files and MySQL database and keep a copy on my computer until we are sure the migration has been successful
2. Make a not of any sub-domain usage
3. Make a note of your email usage:
1. mailboxes in use – sepcifically whether you have mail stored in folders on the server or whether you simply download your email to a client on your computer etc.
2. forwarding of individual addresses
3. catch-all forwarding
4. auto-forwarders
5. send-only addresses
4. Sort out how we’re going to do the migration of your mail, when that’s ready:
5. Install my my migration tool in to your stand alone WordPress site and create the export file of your site
6. Delete your site from my hosting packages
7. Map your domain to my hostingbydavid.co.uk domain
8. Import the file of your site in to my WordPress Network
9. Configure the Domain Mapping within the Network
10. Re-create your sub-domain and email configuration, hopefuly without the loss of a single message!

Your Jobs

1. Give me the username and password for adminstrator access to your standalone WordPress installation; if I don’t already have it
2. Tell me of any other content on your web space that is not a natural part of WordPress (e.g. in other folders) – and wether you want it or not!
3. Take the opportunity to clean up your website content – get rid of old content, delete old media that you don’t use, uninstall old plugins and remove unused themes etc. Generally have a good spring clean so that we transfer only the useful stuff!
4. If you use an email client to connect to the mailserver (via POP) and pick emails (deleting them off the server and storing them in Outlook/Thunderbird etc), then the migration of mailboxes will be very easy, skip to Point 6!
5. If you are using IMAP and store message on the server in folders – we’ll have more work to do because there is, unfortunately, no way to move the content of one IMAP mailbox to a new mailbox on the new Managed WordPress Hosting system:
1. You need to make sure that all your messages and folder structure are transfered to local storage (on your computer)
2. When the new Managed WordPress Hosting system is up and running, you may choose to drop those messages and folders back on to the server again using your email client
6. When I tell you that I have deleted your old site/email – you will need to change the settings in any device on which you read/collect email so that the mail server names (both incoming and outgoing) become mail.hostingbydavid.co.uk instead of mail.yourdomain.co.uk. I should be able to recreate your mailboxes on the Managed WordPress Hosting system in such a way that the mail server name is the only thing you need to change