I recently moved this website from Hostinger Premium Hosting to Hostinger Business Hosting. Smallwanders.net was stressing the ‘premium’ webserver. I was receiving ‘limited resources’ messages even though only ~50% of the 100gb was used. So for improved performance & 200gb storage, I moved this site to a ‘business’ webserver with double the specs. Not a standalone server, but a shared server with twice the capacity & horsepower.

If you migrate a WordPress website from a different hosting service to Hostinger. Hostinger tech support will migrate the website for you within a day or two for free. When I moved from Hostgator to Hostinger, they migrated my three WordPress websites – fotoikigai.com, mindwander.com & smallwanders.net. They were all done within a few days and the migration went flawlessly.
After adding hellomondays.net & ucsdphoto.group websites. Premium hosting resources were stressed even though traffic to any of these sites is very (VERY) low.

Unfortunately, if you are moving from one Hostinger account to another, they do not provide WordPress migration for free. They’ll do it for $50 OR provide detailed instructions (even video) on how to do it yourself. So this is the approach I chose since I have some webmaster knowledge.
In order to migrate a WordPress website to a new account, you create a backup of all the files, directories, and the database. If you want to keep the same domain name, you are instructed to delete your website before setting up the new website. I was reluctant to delete all smallwanders.net files before being absolutely sure the backups & migration worked.

So I chose to duplicate smallwanders.net to a new domain – smallwanders.us. The ‘free for the first year’ domain names that available for registration at Hostinger are limited to: .net, .xyz, .com, .online, .link, .shop, .live, .digital, .tech, .space, .website, .email, .fun, .click, .site, .uno, .in, .host, .store, .press, .me, .help. They’ll register others domains, like .org & .us, but at the regular domain registration fee. Registering smallwanders.us is $3.99 for 1yr on Dynadot.com & $7.99/yr after, so my preferred alternative.

This website’s backup tar.gz file was over 22gb(!) but it turns out the backup included all five websites. So the upload took quite awhile & two attempts. (Tip – use ftp instead of the hPanel file manager’s upload)
Following the ‘moving-a-website-to-another-hostinger-account-and-another-domain‘ instructions, I created a new database using phpMyAdmin. Where things get complicated or confusing is trying to ‘find & replace’ smallwanders.net with smallwanders.us in the database. You can use a MySQL script but you have to specify each table & column to search. phpMyAdmin Search function has Find & Replace but it also requires repeating the process for each table-column. Or, as Hostinger’s instruction instructs, you can ‘use a WordPress plugin’.
I used a much simpler easier method than their suggestions

• After following all of the Hostinger’s instructions, when it came to the Find & Replace step. I did this:
  • In smallwanders.net hPanel, I opened the WordPress database in phpMyAdmin then Exported the database as sql. This process will download the .sql file to your computer.
  • I opened the downloaded .sql file into a text editor (Notepad++) then used search & replace to change ‘smallwanders.net’ to ‘smallwanders.us’
  • Then saved the edited .sql file to a newname.sql to preserve the original, just in case
  • On smallwanders.us, I used phpMyAdmin to opened the new empty WordPress database (created using Hostinger’s instructions) then Imported (uploaded) the edited .sql file.
  • Finally, using smallwanders.us file manager, I edited the wp-config.php file with the new database, username, and password
    • DB_NAME = u123456789_abcd -these are just examples, I used the actual database values
    • DB_USER = u123456789_efgh
    • DB_PASSWORD = ‘@#$%^&*()(‘
  • That’s it – it was much easier than using a search query & quicker than installing a plugin.
• Hostinger’s moving-a-website-to-another-hostinger-account-and-another-domain instructions
• Hostinger’s moving-a-website-to-another-hostinger-account-keeping-the-same-domain instructions
• Hostinger’s how-to-set-up-a-hosting-plan instructions

Although Hostinger Premium Website hosting has many features like 100 domains & 100gb of space. If you upload a lot of media content like photos or video, say over 40gb. You will begin to see a slowdown and get ‘resources are limited’ warnings. So if you want to save yourself some headaches and run a busy site or multiple websites, opt for the Business Web Hosting tier.

Now that smallwanders.us is up and running. I will not hesitate to delete all the smallwanders.net posts & uploads. When that’s done, I’ll point the smallwanders.net domain to smallwanders.us so that URL will still work.