I recently won Site Of The Year 2020 from the Singapore Web Awards organised by Exabytes, a web hosting company of over 20 years. The award comes with trophy, framed certificate, and a lot of credits which I could spend on their services. Since my subscription with my current web host, Vodien, is about to end, I decided to migrate my site to Exabytes.
Exabytes use Plesk instead of cPanel as the hosting control panel, and I was initially apprehensive, but I realised quickly that Plesk is more user-friendly and easier to manage multiple websites with multiple domains. While cPanel is function-driven, Plesk is domain-driven and more WordPress-friendly.
After my experience in moving WordPress two years back, I am more confident in moving my site again. This time round, the move is smoother than expected. Initially, I tried to migrate using the WordPress Toolkit but encountered some database errors during transfer. To avoid any data mismatch, I decided to use Softaculous to do a full backup, upload the compressed file, and then restore. As what I described in my migration post, I had to update a few config files manually to reflect the new server path structure, but I noticed that when I use the WordPress Toolkit, these files are actually updated automatically. Once the domain is completed transfer, I modified the DNS and waited for 2-3 days. Once the new DNS is updated, all traffic are routed to my new web host.
So far, Exabytes has left a good impression on me. They are quite responsive in their support when I faced issues with my domain transfer due to transfer lock status. The subscription price is a third cheaper while the storage space is 4 times more. I also get more features like higher quota for addon domains, mySQL databases, free SSL, free domain, etc. And with available credits, I transferred all my other domains to Exabytes. Domain privacy is included in the price which is great, but somehow the privacy feature is not automatically enabled after transfer, so I had to write in to manually activate it. The server size and processor for my Exabytes web hosting plan, EBiz 12 Plus, is a step down, so I’ll have to monitor and see if it drastically affects my site uptime. In fact, I wasn’t getting high performance during my Vodien days, frequently experiencing 500 Internal Server Error, so I wasn’t willing to go for a higher tier.
Let me know if you are facing any issues accessing my site from now on.