Shell access? We will come and get it
Give us shell access to your current server and we do the rest - find the WordPress installation, move the files with rsync, import the database, and rewrite the config on arrival. Nothing to install on the source, and your site on it is never changed.
14 days free. No credit card. No commitment.
Nothing to install
No plugin on the source
No renewal trap
Renews at the regular price
99.99%
Uptime, last 12 mo
Daily
Backups kept up to 30 days
210+
Tasks Ellie handles
In their words
What people say about hosting with us
“As a non-technical user who has had to stand up many web pages for projects [...] I was very pleasantly surprised with Hostney. The AI assistant Ellie was a tremendous help.”
“Hostney has been a great experience from the start. Anytime something comes up they're on it fast, no waiting around or getting bounced between support reps.”
“Amazing service! Company went above and beyond to help us get set up and functioning.”
“I host multiple websites with Hostney and the ease of management is what does it for me.”
“Hostney feels like the future. The entire process of setting up hosting was seamless, painless and quick.”
“Excellent, reliable service at reasonable prices.”
How it works
Connect, confirm, and walk away
You supply credentials and pick an installation. Everything after that is ours, and you can watch all of it.
Connect
Give us the host, the user and one of three ways to authenticate. We open a session and prove it works before anything else happens.
Discover
We scan the server for WordPress installations and read the version, the plugin list and the database size out of each one.
Choose
Pick the installation you want from the list, or browse the remote filesystem and point at it yourself.
Transfer
Files come over with rsync, the database is dumped and imported, and the log streams while it happens.
Live
We rewrite wp-config, run the URL search-replace, and your site answers on Hostney.
Nothing is queued until the connection is proven
What you need on the source server
Access
Three ways in, and one of them costs you no secret
You are about to give a hosting company access to another company's server. That deserves to be a considered choice rather than a form field, so here is the honest ranking.
Our public key
We show you a public key. You append it to authorized_keys on the source server and tell us when it is there. You never send us a password or a private key, and you revoke our access by deleting one line when you are done. This is the one to use.
Your private key
Paste a key you already have. RSA of at least 2048 bits, ECDSA, or Ed25519 - anything weaker is refused rather than quietly accepted. Best paired with a key made for this job and removed afterwards.
A password
The fallback for hosts that allow nothing else. It works, and it is the method we would least like you to pick. Change the password once the migration is finished.
Revoke our access when you are done
Discovery
You do not have to know where anything lives
The most common reason a migration stalls is nobody being sure which directory the live site is actually served from. We look.
You do not need to know the path
Plenty of people inherit a server and have no idea whether the site lives in public_html, htdocs, or somewhere a previous developer invented. We scan for it and list what we find.
It reads the install before it moves it
Discovery pulls back the WordPress version, the plugin list, the table prefix, the database size and the size on disk - so you can confirm you are about to move the right site, and roughly how long it will take.
Or browse the server yourself
If auto-discovery finds several installs, or the one you want is somewhere unusual, there is a remote file browser in the panel. Click through the source filesystem and point at the directory.
It refuses a directory that is not WordPress
A path has to contain both wp-config.php and wp-load.php before we will queue anything against it. Being told "that is not a WordPress install" immediately beats finding out during the transfer.
What discovery reports back
For every installation it finds, before you commit to moving anything:
- Full path
- WordPress version
- Site URL
- Table prefix
- Plugin list
- Database size
- Files size
The plugin list is the useful one nobody expects: it is where you notice the caching plugin or the security plugin that will need attention on the other side.
The transfer
What the transfer does
Read on your side, write on ours. Your site's files and database are never modified. The only things we write on the source are temporary files under /tmp, such as the database dump, and we remove them when the migration ends.
On your server
We read your config, we do not guess
The database name, user, host and table prefix are parsed out of your wp-config.php, and the site URL out of the config or the database. This is why root or a sudoers account is worth having - without it we cannot read the file that tells us where the database is.
The database is dumped at the source
A dump is taken on your server, transferred, and imported here. Nothing is streamed row by row over the internet the way the plugin has to.
Files move with rsync
The right tool for the job - it moves what it needs to, preserves permissions and timestamps, and does not care that your uploads directory has forty thousand files in it.
On ours
A clean config, with your keys
We generate a fresh wp-config with the new database credentials, and carry your existing authentication keys and salts into it so logged-in sessions survive the move.
Your original config is kept
The old one is preserved beside the new one as wp-config.migrated.php. Any custom constant you had defined is still there to copy over.
The URLs are rewritten
A search-replace runs across the database from your old address to the new one, so links, image sources and serialized option values all follow.
Before you switch
Check the whole site before you touch a DNS record
The cutover is the frightening part of a migration, so we take it out of the critical path.
The config we generate makes WordPress answer on whichever hostname the request arrived on. Your migrated site is usable on its Hostney address the moment the import finishes - log in, click through the admin, check the theme, place a test order.
When you eventually point the domain at us, the same site keeps working on the real hostname with nothing else to change. No second search-replace, and none of the redirecting-back-to-the-old-domain misery that makes people attempt this at 2am.
And the old server keeps running
We only ever read from it. Your site stays live on your current host with its files and database untouched, so the switch happens when you say it does - and cancelling the old account is a decision you make afterwards, at your own pace.
While it runs
A real status, not a progress bar
Every phase is named, and the log streams underneath it.
Connecting
Opening the session and authenticating. If this fails you find out in seconds, not after a long wait.
Scanning
Reading the WordPress installation, its config and its database.
Transferring
Files coming across. The longest phase, and the log tells you what is moving.
Importing
Database import, config rewrite, search-replace.
Completed
Live on Hostney, with the full log kept in your migration history.
Streaming logs
The log appears as it is written, so a slow migration and a stuck one look different. When something fails, the message names the file or the table.
Cancel at any point
Stop a running migration from the panel. Your site on the source server is unaffected, because it was never changed.
Run it again
Migrate into the same destination a second time to pick up content published since the first run. Useful as a final catch-up right before you move DNS.
Other ways in
No shell access? There are two other routes
SSH is the fastest way in when you have it. Most people on shared hosting do not.
The WordPress plugin
Install one plugin on your current site, paste a token, and we pull the site across through it. No shell, no FTP, no export archive - it was built for exactly the hosts that will not give you a terminal.
Have us do it
Included on every paid plan. Tell us what needs moving and our team runs the migration, checks the result, and tells you when to switch DNS.
Pricing
Simple, transparent pricing
Every plan includes managed WordPress, SSH access, daily backups, and enterprise-grade security. Start with a 14-day free trial.
Black Friday30% off up to 3 years with code BLACKFRIDAY30Ends Cyber Monday, November 30
Startup
Great for growing businesses
$7.89
$66.29 a year for up to 3 years, then $94.70/yr
- 1 website
- 10 GB storage
- ~10,000 visits/month: Approximate maximum monthly visits when all hosted sites use our built-in Nginx and Memcached caching
- 5 MySQL databases
- 250,000 inodes: Files, folders, etc.
- 5 FTP users
What's included:
SSL & Domain
- Free SSL certificate
- Free starter domain: A free Hostney address that goes live with your account, so you can build straight away and connect your own domain whenever you are ready
- 2 mailboxes: Shared across every domain on the account rather than counted per domain. Aliases are unlimited and free; a shared mailbox is a real mailbox, so each one uses a slot.
- 3 GB per mailbox: Storage for each mailbox, separate from your account storage.
- Webmail, IMAP and SMTP: Webmail in the browser at mail.hostney.com, plus IMAP and SMTP for Apple Mail, Outlook or any standard mail app. Two-step verification and per-device app passwords are included.
Advanced
For professional websites
$14.97
$125.79 a year for up to 3 years, then $179.70/yr
- 5 websites
- 20 GB storage
- ~110,000 visits/month: Approximate maximum monthly visits when all hosted sites use our built-in Nginx and Memcached caching
- 10 MySQL databases
- 500,000 inodes: Files, folders, etc.
- 10 FTP users
Everything in Startup, plus:
- 5 mailboxes: Shared across every domain on the account rather than counted per domain. Aliases are unlimited and free; a shared mailbox is a real mailbox, so each one uses a slot.
- 5 GB per mailbox: Storage for each mailbox, separate from your account storage.
Backups
- 14 days of backup history: How far back you can restore, download, or browse a backup on this plan. Older snapshots stay stored - upgrading unlocks them.
Performance
- Memcached object cache: In-memory object caching for database queries and sessions, with a cache browser in the panel. Memcached and Redis are the two engines available - an account runs one at a time and can switch between them.
- Redis object cache: Redis object caching with per-key expiry, LRU eviction, and a key browser in the panel. Redis runs instead of Memcached rather than alongside it, so switching engines is one click and the cache rebuilds itself on the next requests.
Pro
Maximum performance and features
$22.89
$192.29 a year for up to 3 years, then $274.70/yr
- 10 websites
- 40 GB storage
- ~200,000 visits/month: Approximate maximum monthly visits when all hosted sites use our built-in Nginx and Memcached caching
- 20 MySQL databases
- 750,000 inodes: Files, folders, etc.
- 20 FTP users
Everything in Advanced, plus:
- 10 mailboxes: Shared across every domain on the account rather than counted per domain. Aliases are unlimited and free; a shared mailbox is a real mailbox, so each one uses a slot.
- 10 GB per mailbox: Storage for each mailbox, separate from your account storage.
Deployment
- 2 SSR applications: Run server-rendered Node.js, Python, or Ruby apps in their own container - Next.js, Nuxt, Django, Rails, and more
Backups
- 30 days of backup history: How far back you can restore, download, or browse a backup on this plan - the full window we keep backups for.
Monitoring
- 1 minute between checks: How often we request the page. Two consecutive failures open an incident and a single success closes it, so you hear within roughly twice this interval.
For new customers on annual plans. Enter the code at checkout, or when you upgrade a free trial before the sale ends. The 30% comes off every year you pay for up front, 1 to 3 years; after that, renewals are at the plan's regular price. Ends 11:59 p.m. Eastern on Monday, November 30.
Migration is free
Point us at your server
Would it be a bad idea to copy your site across and check it on its Hostney address before you touch DNS? Add the credentials, let discovery find your site, and start the transfer. Nothing on your current host changes, and nothing moves in public until you point your domain at us.
Questions