Website Migration

Phoenix Transformational Services, now known as Phoenix Works is a UK Based preventive mental health training provider. They advocate a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach to mental ill-health and aim to create a mentally healthy working culture.

1/1 The Client

Paul started his career in 1993 in young people’s mental health, drug and alcohol services where he was trained and practiced as a counselor and a street-based outreach worker and service leader in London. Alongside, he worked with hard-to-reach socially excluded young people. He successfully introduced them into counseling to help them break the cycle of drug use with the aim of reintegrating them into mainstream society. In early 2000, Paul joined the UK National Health Service initiative to develop evidence-based, supported employment services in London. This is where the idea of Phoenix Works started to grow its wings. 

1/2 The Challenge

The client had a WordPress site that was not loading on his current server and the size of the entire web project was also extremely large. He had previously failed to transfer the website through a regular migration tool and so he reached out to us to have the project migrated through FTP. The challenge was to reduce the size of the project due to limitations on the new server and then migrate the site.

1/2 The Solution

So we worked out a solution that would resolve this issue of size and migration, which was to temporarily host client’s project on to our server without changing the current nameservers. This would give us full access to the back-end files and PHP settings, as well as the ability to run a full-scale malware test on the files, which happens to be one of the reasons for an abnormal increase in web size. First thing we did downloading the web project through FTP was to create a temporary user account for the client on our server at www.hostodian.com

We extracted the zipped file onto our server and had the website fully hosted under a temporary domain. We forwarded the client his new WordPress credentials to allow him to make any desired changes through the front-end while we scanned the back-end data and deleted redundant files, deleted unused themes, plugins and back-ups.

1/3 The Results

We were successfully able to reduce the project size and move it over to the destination host. We extracted the files on to a new WordPress installation and then initiated nameserver change at the domain registrar’s. The domain had propagated to the new server IP in less time than expected.

As best practice, we also added Cloudflare CDN for the client. Once the DNS settings were done, the website loaded at the new host without any error. The client was advised to install an SSL certificate to ground the security measures.