Hey, what’s going on everyone, thanks for tuning into another episode of the Above-The-Fold podcast show for bloggers, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, freelancers, and content creators. My name is Fabrizio Van Marciano and I am your host. In this episode, I’ll share why we decided to move our blog from SiteGround to Kinsta!

This is Episode 15, and I know that there’s been a big gap between this episode and the last. I published episode 14 back in February, I think. So what can I say? It’s been a busy time. A lot has been happening on the business front, blogging front, and life in general. Lots of planning and changes are happening.

My wife Samantha started a new career back at the start of the year, and she’s also the part-time editor here at Magnet4Blogging, so she’s been helping me out with content auditing and updating some of the older blog posts on Magnet4Blogging.

I’ve also been busy working on other projects, producing music and building my online course, creating content for my YouTube channel, and so on. So I put creating new content for Magnet4Blogging on the back-burner for a little while. I think I talked about those things already in a past episode, so I won’t go into them again.

Talking of changes, over the last month, I’ve been upgrading the tech stack here on Magnet4Blogging. As well as my freelancer business website at Fabrizio Van Marciano dot com. As a result, I’ve been trimming back on the number of plugins I’m using, particularly on this blog. Ideally, I want to get my plugins to count under 12, and I think I’m almost there.

Another significant change, which also happens to be the topic of this episode, is that we migrated Magnet4Blogging from SiteGround to Kinsta!

Yep, it’s finally happened. I’ve talked about doing this for some time now. I planned on moving Magnet4Blogging to another host when I initially published my review of Kinsta back in October of 2019, so it’s only taken me a few years, but we got there eventually.

So in this episode, I thought I’d share with you – you know: Why I decided to make the change, the transition process, and I’ve got to say that it was less stressful than I thought. I pretty much did the entire migration myself from SiteGround; it wasn’t that hard to do. Although, I received some fantastic assistance from the Kinsta team on a few DNS issues, which they helped me out with.

And so here we are, almost a month of using Kinsta, and what can I say? I’m pretty ecstatic about it! Early days, yet, I know. Something could still go drastically wrong, but it should be fine; I’m optimistic about it.

I have every confidence that Kinsta is an excellent hosting company and that we made the right choice. Like I said, I got the opportunity to test-drive their platform a few years back and review it. And so, I’m happy to be hosting my blog with them. Of course, they’ve not been around for long, but I’m excited about using them, finally.

Why we decided to leave SiteGround for Kinsta?

So, let me roll back to the beginning and talk about the dilemma I was experiencing with SiteGround. But I must say that SiteGround has been a great host; they still are a great host. I’ll continue to use them for smaller WordPress projects, although I may migrate my freelance website FVM to Kinsta in the coming weeks.

The main issue I was experiencing with SiteGround was that my blog wasn’t loading correctly. You know, it just appeared broken from time to time. Like the layout and CSS would be all off. If I didn’t notice it immediately, my visitors would let me know via my Facebook page. So each time this happened, I had to log in to my SiteGround account to flush out the Dynamic and Memcache.

Now, this problem only arose if I happened to log into my WordPress. And only if I were to make any changes to a blog post, publish new articles, tweak my blog design, etc. At first, I thought, perhaps, I was using too many optimization plugins. I was using Autoptimize, Perfmatters, and the SG Optimizer plugin. Yeah, maybe that was way too many. But in any case, even after removing those plugins and cleaning the database, flushing out the cache, eventually, the problem would return.

So with my blog appearing broken every so often, alarm bells were ringing off in my Google webmaster console. I was receiving notifications for mobile usability issues. I was also having some page speed issues.

Anyway, I decided to back up everything and remove all of the unnecessary and heavy plugins, tracking scripts, analytics scripts and test my site again, and it was still experiencing problems. So, I migrated my blog to Kinsta. That’s the short of it.

Before I dive into the details and results and where I am now with the blog, let me just briefly explain the process very quickly. I won’t dive into the details because I want to create a video tutorial soon on migrating to Kinsta.

Migrating Our Blog To Kinsta

My first step was to sign up for Kinsta Hosting. I didn’t need any more convincing at this time; I was ready to make a move.

I signed up for their Starter Plan to begin. Once my account was up, I created an empty environment for my WordPress website.

The next step was to backup my blog via SiteGround; I then installed the duplicator plugin. I’ll have a link to this plugin in the show notes if you need it.

Resource: Duplicator plugin.

I have to say; the plugin is a lifesaver. It allowed me to create a complete copy of my blog right in my WP dashboard before compressing it into a nice zip file, which I could then download onto my computer. There was also an installer script that I needed to download with my zip file.

Next, I went back into my Kinsta hosting account to obtain my SFTP credentials for the empty website I created. I used an app for the mac called CyberDuck, an FTP client, to connect to my Kinsta account server. I then dragged and dropped the website files from my computer into CyberDuck and uploaded it to Kinsta.

Recommended: Cyberduck Application for Mac and Windows

Once I had unpacked everything onto my new Kinsta account, I could access my blog via a temporary domain to make sure it was working.

The next step was to point my domain name to the server on Kinsta hosting my blog. Of course, it was a little bit more technically involved than that. I followed instructions provided in a Kinsta tutorial, which was very useful. I’ll link to this tutorial if you want to check it out too.

The only issue I had is that I didn’t know how to change a few DNS settings correctly, which the Kinsta team guided me through carefully, and I can’t thank them enough for that.

The final step was to perform a search and replace fo all of the internal and external links. I needed to change them from my temporary domain to my main domain.

Just for the record, I actually didn’t need to migrate my blog myself manually. I could have easily allowed the Kinsta team to do it because I did get one free migration for the starter account. But, honestly, I wanted to learn how to do this myself, so I did.

Right then, so migrating to Kinsta is simple enough if you’re WordPress savvy, but if you aren’t sure what you’re doing, or if you’re not confident to do it yourself, click on the Request Migration when you have your account setup. Assuming you are looking to migrate to Kinsta too.

So what is the result?

Well, as I said, it’s very early days yet. We’ve been with SiteGround since 2015, but I already love a few positives about using Kinsta. One of which, of course, is no more broken website, messy CSS, and HTML issues.

We’ve also ditched a few heavy plugins and removed the Google Analytics tracking script from the blog. Why? Well, because we now have analytics right in our Kinsta account, plus, I don’t look at the traffic stats that often anymore. We have been trying out a paid service called Plausible, which provides more accurate and less intrusive data about our blog traffic.

I also took the liberty to drop some redundant databases and empty rows from the blog after removing the plugins, and it’s loading very nicely and quickly. I’m, honestly, thrilled.

So yeah, guys, I just wanted to let you know that we moved web hosting providers. We’re proudly running on Kinsta’s fully managed WordPress Hosting. Kinsta offers premium hosting that brings state-of-the-art tech, high-speed network, next-gen infrastructure powered by the Google Cloud Platform if you don’t already know.

If you’re thinking about changing web host providers for your blog, I highly recommend checking out Kinsta. If speed, security, and expert support matter, and, of course, you’re a WordPress user, then you’ll love using them. I’ll have a link to Kinsta in the show notes for this episode.

Recommended: Kinsta WordPress Cloud Hosting

They are on the expensive side, but you get what you pay for, and that’s high-quality premium service. You’ll find links to Kinsta in the show notes of this episode. And also the footer of every page on Magnet4Blogging. These are affiliate links, so if you click on them and purchase Kinsta hosting, I will be paid a small commission, but at no additional cost to you. (Disclaimer below).

OK, so that’s all I have for you in this episode; I hope you enjoyed tuning in. If you did, please consider leaving me a short review over on iTunes and Google Podcasts too. And I would ask you to subscribe, but I’ve taken down my subscription page for the time being. But hopefully, it will be back up soon.

If you want to learn more about me and my blog, head over to Magnet4Blogging.net. OK, chow for now, take care, stay safe, and go create some awesome content. Peace!

Podcast tools used

Hardware

13″ Macbook Pro (Affiliate link)Focusrite 2i2 Audio Interface (Affiliate link)Rode NT-1 Microphone (Affiliate link)Neewer Mic Suspension Arm (Affiliate link)Neewer NW-3000 Monitoring Headphones (Affiliate link)

Software / Tools / Resources

Garageband (Tutorial for recording and editing podcasts)Auphonic (Audio leveling)Fusebox (Affiliate link – Podcast Player)Libsyn (Podcast hosting)Podcast ArtworkSoundStripe (Affiliate link – Podcast Music)

Affiliate Disclaimer: Some of the links on this post and mentioned in this podcast episode are affiliate links. This means if you click on one of these links and make a purchase of a product or service, I will be paid a small commission, but at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your continued support.

Read more: magnet4blogging.net