Easy Steps to Upgrade to VPS Hosting from Shared Hosting

Most businesses will prefer to start off with shared hosting plans primarily because of the fact that these are more cost-effective than all the others. However, with their websites showing steady growth, it becomes necessary to provision more resources than what shared hosting can offer. This is why shifting to VPS plans make more sense for businesses that need more resources but do not have the funds or expertise to maintain dedicated servers. Below is listed some of the easy steps which organizations can take to make this transition smooth and trouble-free:

- To start with, it is very important to create a site backup which is going to help you transfer databases and files to other servers. Besides, this backup will also protect you in case anything goes wrong during the switch to VPS hosting. So, you need to first access the control panel to move to the Backups option. When you click on the Backups tab, you will get to view all the files. You have the choice to generate new backups and when you click on this, the backups are started.

- In the next step, you will be expected to install the VPS hosting server. You are advised to select a template which contains My SQL or LAMP built into it. This helps in easier management of the servers. After you have reserved a few minutes to install the operating system you can move onto setting the VPS up. The VPS IP address, SSH port, username and other important details can be seen in SSH and if you do not have the root password, it is possible to reset it as well. You will be taken to a login box and prompted to enter the SSH credentials. There is a post installation wizard which is there to guide you every step of the way. When you click on the "Setup" option, the VPS installation starts.

- It is recommended that you also transfer domain name to your new domain registrar. This is advisable if you have to change the hosting provider; else this step is optional. When emails are important for your business you need run email servers on your VPS server you need click "Yes" on the email domain lookup server option. This is needed to make emails services quicker. You should also agree to virus scanning, spam filtering and choose the back-end database service. To stop others from managing the MySQL database, you need to set a secure and strong password only for the main user.

- To start with VPS installation you must create new user, directory for the website and a MYSQL database. You need to select the option for creating a virtual server and then type in the domain name as well as administrator password. With these actions, a simple VPS server can be deployed and this is enough for hosting a site.

- Once the VPS has been successfully installed you must transfer the databases and files one after the other from the original shared server. When your website uses control panels like cPanel or Plesk, you may run a backup using wizards or via a backup and restore interface. With cPanel, you may back up the whole website, download this and then later upload it to the new VPS server. When you shift from shared to VPS hosting you are possibly still using the control panel. So, you can log into it and move to phpMyAdmin inside the dashboard. Here, you get to choose the database which contains the site and then click on "Export" option. When this has been downloaded and then opened you can move to the "File" menu to get "Site Manager" and then to the "New Site" option where you have to mention the website name, the domain name and the port. After providing your cPanel password, you are free to click on "Connect" to shift the files. When you have a backup of the files you can copy this link to get the backup archives for your site files. Once you have extracted this you will get a new folder containing all site files.

- Your task it to import all the files and databases to the new server. So, you just log into the control panel in the VPS account to open phpMyAdmin and then click on New Database: followed by "Import" option. You can identify the SQL file which you had exported previously and select "Go" option.

- When you have successfully transferred both the site files and the MySQL databases, the WordPress site may not work as planned. You are likely to get errors when trying to establish database connections. You will then have to edit the configuration files. You must update these with MySQL database details. When all changes have been made you can press on Ctrl + X followed by Y and Enter to save the changes. Your final step is to point domain name to this new VPS server from the shared server. You simply go to the DNS provider and alter the value assigned to A record to make sure it points to the new VPS server.

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