This post is the second in a series called “Pagely Answers“, which seeks to provide in-depth answers to questions that are hard to handle with a simple FAQ.
One of the most common questions we get asked is about how our migration process works. In this post, I’ll explain our migration policy as well as the steps to get migrated over. Let’s begin with our policy. For business plans and above, we migrate up to 2 WordPress installs for free. Those installs can be single or multisite mode, doesn’t matter to us. If you need additional WordPress installs moved, then we charge $100 each, unless you’re purchasing a VPS or Enterprise plan and need us to move a bunch, in which case we may be able to discount them on a case by case basis. If you are unsure what a WordPress install is and you just have a single site hosted on WordPress, then you’re running just one WordPress install and fall under our limit of two, so we would move that for free if you purchase a business plan or higher.
As for how the process works, after you’ve signed up for your plan either online or manually (Enterprise accounts), simply choose your preferred method of migration from within Atomic.
If you can get SSH access from your current web host, then that makes the process a lot easier and faster for our team, which means you can get away from your old host a lot quicker (usually a bonus, since most of our customers come to us because they’re having problems someplace else). If you don’t know what SSH is, then please check out this article I wrote on the topic. Even if your current provider isn’t providing you with SSH at the moment, sometimes you just have to request it. You might be surprised how easy it is to get if you ask, and even some of the cheapest shared hosting plans can get it if they ask nicely. Giving SSH to $10/month plans is kind of dangerous from a security standpoint and that’s why we only offer it on VPS and above. However, if you can get it from your host, might as well make your (and our) life easier.
Once you’ve filled out the migration form, it typically takes 3-5 business days if you purchased a standard plan, and often much less (1-2 business days) if you purchased a VPS or Enterprise. After filling out the form you’ll receive an email since a migration ticket gets created, and if you haven’t heard back in the appropriate time period mentioned then feel free to reply to that ticket asking the status. If you purchased a personal plan and need instructions on how to migrate your site to us yourself, please check out this help desk article.