After considering changing my web hosting, for various sites one thing has occurred to me which may be worth an airing and that is that the act of migration can be non-trivial with larger sites these days. If you have a domain with a couple of established blogs and maybe a mediawiki installation then it’s not just a question of ftp-ing a few dozen files or so. The software itself takes up a lot of space for each installation, together with all the plugins and customisations, then there’s the content section which may have a large number of images each with thumbnails and size options, and finally the mySQL databases which are not always so easy to transfer. As far as I know there is no way to ftp across from one website to another so the whole process needs to be done twice, once to download an entire site to a local computer, and once again to upload everything to the new host. File permissions are often not re-created exactly the same as the original leading to access errors which all need sorting out.
One utility which helps with the process is a program called mysqldumper. It makes sure your database is fully exported and re-imported, getting over any file size limitations.
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