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Moving a Web Site from GoDaddy to IONOS

My clients use a wide variety of vendors for domain name registration, web hosting, email and SSL certificate, however I recommend making life simpler by choosing a single vendor to provide all of these services in one place, making tech support much easier, and billing from a single company. Greg volunteers at the Clackamas Dogs Foundation, and their site was hosted at GoDaddy, along with domain name registration, but there were sporadic downtime reports every single week for several minutes per outage. I recommended that we migrate everything from GoDaddy over to IONOS, where the reliability is much higher. This blog is about how that process works.

Unlock the Domain Name

At GoDaddy the first step was to unlock the domain name, making it ready to transfer to IONOS, in the process they provide an Authorization Code. This is for security purposes so that hackers do not take control of your domain name without an approval process.

New Account at IONOS

The second step was to have Greg create a new account at IONOS and have it billed to his credit card, that way he owns the account and controls it, just like owning the title to your car or home mortgage. This took a few minutes, and during the process he was prompted to enter the domain name that he wanted to use with his new hosting plan. IONOS determined that clackamasdogsfoundation.org was already registered, then asked for the Authorization Code to transfer the domain name.

Export WordPress Content

I logged into the WordPress site, still hosted at GoDaddy, then installed a plugin called All In One WP Migration. Running the Export feature created a 1.08GB file, which I downloaded to my desktop.

Setup New WordPress at IONOS

Now that I had exported the existing WordPress site, it was time to login at IONOS and install WordPress, add the same migration plugin, then start an Import. Since the domain name hadn’t transferred yet, I installed WordPress at an address supplied by IONOS as s886378835.onlinehome.us. Now all of the web content was migrated from GoDaddy to IONOS.

Confirm Domain Name Transfer

IONOS sent a domain name transfer request to GoDaddy, then GoDaddy sends an email to the domain name owner. So Greg received the email, and confirmed that he really wanted to transfer the domain name from GoDaddy to IONOS. Then we waited about six days for GoDaddy to actually release and transfer the domain name.

IONOS Final Steps

Greg sent me an email about his domain name contact info being updated, so that was the final acknowledgement that the domain name had been transferred to IONOS. I logged into his IONOS account and connected the newly transferred domain name clackamasdogsfoundation.org to the WordPress installation folder. Next, I setup the SSL Certificate for clackamasdogsfoundation.org. Finally, I logged into the WordPress site, and updated the URL, changing s886378835.onlinehome.us to https://clackamasdogsfoundation.org

Summary

Migrating your web hosting and domain registrar from GoDaddy to IONOS is a multi-step process, requiring collaboration between a technical resource and the account holder, resulting in a web site that is more reliable, and operates at a lower annual cost. So contact Tualatin Web, LLC if you want to move your WordPress site from one place to another.

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