The search for a new hosting provider can be a tedious one, and can sometimes leave you with more questions than when you started! Typically hosting providers will showcase their standard features such as pricing, traffic limitations, storage and included installs right on their website. But what about everything behind the scenes that we are doing to improve the performance, security and ongoing optimization of your site? or what exactly we’re doing to elevate our hands on management to a new industry standard? or what we’re doing to proactively catch issues before they impact you or your visitors?
Our goal as your soon-to-be hosting provider is to cement ourselves as your technical partner, which starts by being transparent and by doing our best to provide a completely stress-free on-boarding experience. To help make your transition easier, we have compiled a list of our most frequently asked questions.
What Is The Migration Process Like? How Long Does It Take?
At BigScoots, we take care of the entire migration process for you from start to finish. If you have selected our Fully Managed WordPress Hosting service you will receive a welcome email which will provide access to our WordPress Optimized Portal (WPO). Within the WPO portal, you’ll be able to very easily and securely submit your migration request.
Once we receive your migration request, our expert team will begin your migration as soon as possible. It will be an entirely seamless process, without a moment of downtime. Everything will be completely optimized during the migration, as well as a full security audit ran.
Our managed WordPress migrations are completed in the order they are received, on average within 5 hours. If you are down or experiencing an issue with your current host, please reach out to us so we can expedite your move.
We will always keep you updated along the way and of course, if you have any questions we are always available to help!
If you instead opted for a Shared Hosting service, once signed up you will simply submit a support ticket or email support@bigscoots.com with your previous host’s login details. You can expect your shared migration to be completed within 24 hours.
See: The Difference Between BigScoots Shared hosting and Managed WordPress Hosting
Can I Expect To See An Improvement In Site Speed?
Absolutely. Having moved tens of thousands of clients from other hosts over the years, we know how things are done elsewhere and we know what results to expect for our clients.
As a small, agile and efficient expert team, we are able to dedicate a serious amount of one-on-one time to each and every client that walks through our doors. This allows for the time necessary to properly and proactively optimize our client’s sites.
If you haven’t already, you might be interested to check out our comparison page. Please let us know if you’d prefer to not see your site on our list, otherwise, you can expect it! 🙂
We’re up to a little over 1000 comparisons now that we’ve done during migrations from different providers, some well known such as WPEngine, Kinsta, Liquidweb, Pagely, Flywheel among many others.
You might be surprised to see just how much faster a site can be if its optimized with a serious amount of hands-on time and attention.
Why Is BigScoots Better Than Other Premium Managed WordPress Hosts?
We have a relentless drive to deliver the best service and management in the industry. Which is the reason why our clients continue to choose us over our competitors year after year.
As a team who are able to dedicate the time each and every one of our clients requires means that we’re the team who can deliver faster, more reliable and superior services every single time.
We have demonstrated over the decade that we’ve been in business that we will never settle for anything less and that is exactly what you can expect from us.
What Is The Difference Between Shared Hosting And Fully Managed WordPress Hosting?
Our Fully Managed WordPress Hosting Services are built very specifically with WP in mind from the ground up which means they deliver seriously improved load times and drastically elevated management as a result when compared against any provider we’ve ever tested against. Each WP plan is built on its own dedicated virtual environment which allows us to completely optimize your individual WP environment with just your site in mind.
While the dedicated environment is important for leveraging things like nginx and redis which help optimize and speed up your site, perhaps more importantly and what really sets this service apart from our competitors, is our hands on management. We proactively dig deep into issues other providers tend not to touch such as stuck PHP processes, database inefficiencies, plugin conflicts, ongoing optimizations, security hardening, and much more. With ~30 proactive monitors in place, we actively seek out and work to prevent issues before they impact you or your visitors.
Shared Hosting on the other hand is exactly that. You are sharing your resources with others on the server which is a great way to reduce your overall cost, but will unfortunately be unable to achieve the same level of performance or hands on management.
Take a peak at our blog post for a deeper comparison.
What Will Happen To My Domain Name If It Is Registered With A Different Provider?
You are welcome to keep your domains with their current domain registrar, or alternatively you can transfer them over to BigScoots. There is a small yearly registration fee to do so of $15.95, which will automatically renew your registration for an additional 12 months at the time of transfer.
Where you choose to have your domains registered has zero effect on the performance of your site. Many clients choose to transfer their domains to BigScoots purely for the ease of keeping all of their billing nice and organized in one place, but it is not necessary to do so.
Please note: If you would like to transfer your domain, please wait ~48 hours after your migration has completed before requesting it as performing a website and domain transfer at the same time can cause conflicts.
Can I Migrate My Website From Wix/Squarespace/Blogger/Weebly Over To WordPress? Will BigScoots Help Me?
Yes, absolutely. There is no added cost for it, and it would be available on any of our Fully Managed WordPress services.
Your migration request will be submitted as it usually would from within your WordPress Optimized Portal. Once we have your login details, we will set you up on a staging domain, which is a private domain not visible to the public internet and password protected to prevent search engine indexing which will not impact your live site in any way.
We will then import all of your content to the best of WP and your selected theme’s capability, and install your new theme of choice. Some page builders, such as Wix or Weebly, do not provide the access needed for us to import your content into WordPress, while some others, such as SquareSpace, do. In many cases, it is a more seamless route to move your posts and content manually.
You will then have your fresh WordPress install, your new theme ready to go as well as your current content on a private staging domain that you can tinker with until you’re happy. Once satisfied, we will push your staging site live. In many cases it is most efficient to manually migrate your content into your new WP theme we have setup for you on your staging site.
Please note: It is critically important to remember that you are undergoing a significant backend overhaul. While we’ve had some amazing successes of people moving from site building services to our managed WordPress services all done entirely by BigScoots, results absolutely do vary and we cannot guarantee that we will be able to handle the entire pixel perfect transition for you – as every single site, theme, plugins, content, etc. are different. We always say to expect to hire a developer, of which we would be very happy to recommend some we’ve worked with in the past to you.
If you are interested in reading more about this process, you can check out our detailed explanation.
This migration is not currently available with our Shared Hosting services.
Does BigScoots Offer Phone Support?
We offer technical support through our support desk – and for good reason.
Hosting at BigScoots means you are getting a personable response 24/7 within 5 minutes from a real expert you know by name, who already knows your system inside and out, who you trust to work tirelessly to proactively monitor, optimize and improve performance and security without needing to be asked. We consider ourselves your partner, are personally invested in your success and deliver a hosting environment designed just for you.
A big reason we’ve been able to maintain the industry leading support and management we have over the decade we’ve been in business is because we’re so efficient and we operate in a support excess rather than a support deficit. Many hosts have hundreds of unanswered or pending tickets which require customers to wait for a reply. BigScoots on the other hand invests proactively in our support team and has enough support excess to answer tickets immediately when they are submitted, allowing us the time to dig far deeper into issues than an otherwise overworked support team could. This excess also gives us the opportunity to proactively address issues before they impact you or your visitors.
Having a laser focused support and management team, who are professionally trained and formally educated WP developers, system admins and network engineers, means we can answer questions without delay and near immediate resolution times. You’ll see the difference immediately, guaranteed.
Does BigScoots Offer Backups?
Yes. Our Fully Managed WordPress Hosting services will provide you with automated backups that are stored off-server and off-network on our dedicated backup appliances for added redundancy. Each backup is taken around midnight (CST) and kept for 30 days, giving you a massive 30 unique restore points.
You are also able to manually take additional backups when ever you wish. Each backup is of your entire site and can be downloaded or restored at any time.
Our Shared Hosting services provide you with full account backups that are taken every night and kept for 14 days in our secure dedicated backup appliances, giving you two full weeks of revisions to restore from.
Does BigScoots Host Email?
Yes, we would be happy to host your email!
As a Fully Managed WordPress Hosting client your Webmail and email settings are available to you in your WPO Portal. You are also able to create an unlimited number of new email accounts with 10GB of additional storage.
As a Shared Hosting client, you have all your email services located in your cPanel account.
Does BigScoots Offer Staging Sites?
Yes, we do. As a Fully Managed WordPress Hosting client you are able to create a staging site seamlessly from within your WPO Portal. With just a single click, you will create a replica of your live site in developer mode with all caching disabled – allowing you to test any new developments and changes you are implementing privately before making them live.
As a Shared Hosting client you are able to create a staging site within cPanel with a few clicks allowing you to test new developments and changes in similar way.
Will I Have Access To cPanel?
Yes, as a Shared Hosting client you will have full access to cPanel.
As a Fully Managed WordPress client, you will have access to our WordPress Optimized Portal rather than cPanel, which provides you with WordPress specific features, improvements to your workflow over what cPanel traditionally offers, as well as access to all our improved management features.
Can I Give A Developer Or Team Member Access To My Dashboard?
No matter your workflow or team size, it is always critical to be able to collaborate effectively with key members of your team.
As a Fully Managed WordPress Hosting client, you are able to quickly and easily share access to others on your team, giving them full or restricted control over your BigScoots account using the collaboration feature within your WPO Portal.
As a Shared Hosting client, you are able to add a key member of your team as an additional contact within your BigScoots Dashboard.
Can BigScoots Remove The Dates From My Permalinks?
Yes. This a common request from many of our clients, and we’d be happy to take care of it for you to ensure it is done correctly! Simply submit a support ticket requesting the adjustment and we’ll have it done within minutes!
Conclusion
As we continue to work diligently to ensure that both your migration process and overall experience with BigScoots is as stress-free as possible, we will continue to update our FAQ’s. Stay tuned!
Did we miss something? Contact our sales team to let us know!
Written by Scott
CEO & Co-founder
