Most hosting reviews are written by people who have never actually moved a website.
They sign up, poke around the dashboard, maybe install WordPress, run a speed test on an empty site, and call it a review. That’s not a review. That’s a brochure with someone else’s opinions pasted over it.
I wanted to know what hosting companies are actually like to live with — not what they look like on day one, but what happens when you migrate a real website, when traffic spikes unexpectedly, when something breaks and you need help at a bad time, when your renewal comes up and suddenly the numbers don’t add up.
So I did something a little extreme.
I took the same website — a real WordPress site with 47 pages, a WooCommerce store, a membership plugin, 3,200 images, and six years of blog content — and migrated it to eight different hosting companies over 30 days.
Every single move. Every problem that came up. Every support interaction. Every bill.
Here’s the honest, sometimes ugly, sometimes surprising account of what I found.
Why Moving an Existing Website Reveals Things a Fresh Install Never Will
Here’s the thing about testing hosting with a brand new WordPress install: it tells you almost nothing useful.
A fresh install has no baggage. No accumulated database entries, no conflicting plugins, no legacy image sizes, no caching layers built up over years. Every host looks great with a clean slate.
But nobody runs a brand new website forever. Your real website is the one with history — the one with quirks and complexity and years of decisions baked into it. That’s the website that reveals what a host is genuinely capable of.
A migration stress-tests everything at once: file transfer reliability, database handling, email continuity, DNS propagation, support responsiveness, and backup integrity. If a host is going to fail you, it will almost certainly fail you during a migration — or reveal the conditions under which it eventually would.
The Website I Used
To keep this honest, here are the specs of the test site:
- Platform: WordPress 6.4
- Size: 14.7GB total (files + database)
- WooCommerce: 340 products, 6 years of order history
- Plugins: 23 active plugins
- Traffic profile: ~8,000 monthly visitors
- Email: 4 professional email accounts tied to the domain
- SSL: Active, with mixed content history (old HTTP images)
This is a real, lived-in website. Not a showroom model.
Host #1: Tremhost — The Baseline
I started with Tremhost to establish a baseline, since I’d be returning here at the end of the experiment.
The migration: Their team handled the migration for me — no extra charge. I submitted a request, provided credentials to my old host, and the site was live on Tremhost servers in under four hours. Every page, every product, every order record, every email account — intact.
What broke: Nothing. Genuinely nothing. The mixed-content SSL issue I’d been carrying around for years actually got flagged and explained to me during the process — something no previous host had ever mentioned.
Support interaction: One conversation, entirely proactive on their end.
Speed post-migration: Faster than the previous host by a measurable margin — confirmed across three different testing tools.
The renewal reality: Pricing was exactly what I was quoted. No surprises.
Overall: Set the bar high. Made me wonder why I was about to spend 30 days moving this website around. (Answer: so you don’t have to.)
Host #2: A Household Name With a Super Bowl Ad Budget
I won’t name them, but you’ve seen their ads. Probably during a major sporting event. Possibly endorsed by a celebrity whose name you’d recognise.
The migration: Took 31 hours. Their migration tool crashed twice, recovered without warning me, and silently dropped 214 product images. I only discovered the missing images when a test customer tried to browse the store.
What broke: Product images (214 of them), two plugin configurations that the migration tool “simplified” without asking, and one email account that arrived with the wrong password and no documentation on how to reset it.
Support interaction: 3 conversations, totalling 2 hours 14 minutes. The first agent gave me incorrect instructions. The second fixed what the first had made worse. The third confirmed everything was stable — it wasn’t, but I didn’t find that out until 48 hours later.
Speed post-migration: Slower than Tremhost. About 340ms slower on average — not dramatic, but measurable.
The renewal reality: The price I’d pay in month 13 was 3.4x the introductory rate. That’s not a small print issue. That’s a business model.
Overall: Polished marketing. Underwhelming product.
Host #3: The “Managed WordPress” Premium Option
This one positioned itself as the premium, hands-off solution for serious WordPress users. The price reflected that positioning — about 4x what I was paying at Tremhost.
The migration: Smooth, I’ll give them that. Professional, well-documented process. Site was live in 6 hours with minimal issues.
What broke: My membership plugin — which has 400 active members — was incompatible with their proprietary caching system. The result was that logged-in users were seeing cached versions of other users’ account pages. A data privacy issue hiding inside a caching configuration.
To their credit, when I raised this, support identified the problem within the hour. The fix required disabling a feature that was one of the main reasons I was supposedly paying the premium.
Support interaction: Fast, knowledgeable, genuinely helpful. Best support I encountered outside Tremhost.
Speed post-migration: Excellent on desktop. Mobile performance was surprisingly inconsistent — something their sales page didn’t mention.
The renewal reality: Premium pricing at renewal too. At least they’re consistent about it.
Overall: Genuinely good product with a real flaw they haven’t fully solved. Worth it if you don’t run a membership site and have the budget.
Host #4: The Budget Favourite Everyone Recommends
This host appears on almost every “best cheap hosting” list. The articles ranking it are almost all written by people earning affiliate commissions for sending you there. I say this not as an accusation but as relevant context for interpreting those rankings.
The migration: I used their advertised one-click migration plugin. It ran for 4 hours, reported success, and delivered a website where the homepage loaded correctly and approximately 30% of internal pages threw database errors.
What broke: Database tables. Several were either incompletely transferred or corrupted during import. The WooCommerce order history was partially intact — meaning some orders existed, some didn’t, and there was no way to know from the front end which were missing.
Support interaction: 4 conversations over 26 hours. Each agent started from scratch with no reference to the previous conversation. On the third conversation, I was told the migration issue was “not covered under support” and directed to a paid migration service they offered for an additional fee.
Speed post-migration: Genuinely bad during peak hours. Sub-60 GTmetrix scores at 2pm on a Tuesday.
The renewal reality: Aggressive. The introductory price was low enough to feel like a trap in retrospect.
Overall: The affiliate rankings make sense. The hosting doesn’t.
Host #5: The Cloud-Infrastructure Option
A managed cloud hosting platform built on top of a major cloud provider. Technical, powerful, genuinely impressive if you know what you’re doing.
The migration: Manual. There is no migration tool. You build the server environment, configure everything, then transfer files and database yourself — or pay a developer to do it.
I paid a developer to do it. It took 3 hours of their time and cost me the price of half a year’s hosting elsewhere.
What broke: Email. Cloud hosting of this type doesn’t include email hosting — that’s handled separately. Migrating the email accounts required setting up a third-party email service, pointing MX records correctly, and waiting for DNS propagation. During that 24-hour window, emails sent to my domain vanished.
Support interaction: Documentation-first culture. Excellent documentation. But if you need a human, you’re waiting.
Speed post-migration: The fastest load times I recorded in the entire experiment. Genuinely impressive.
The renewal reality: Transparent and fair. No tricks.
Overall: The best performance available — but with a complexity and cost overhead that makes it unsuitable for anyone who isn’t comfortable managing infrastructure. If you have a developer on retainer, it’s worth exploring.
Host #6: The Eco-Friendly, Values-Led Option
Solar-powered servers, carbon offset commitments, a genuine values-led brand. I wanted to like this one.
The migration: Adequate. Nothing stood out as particularly good or bad. The site transferred cleanly but slowly — 9 hours for a 14.7GB site felt long.
What broke: The WooCommerce checkout. Specifically, the payment gateway integration threw SSL errors that weren’t present on the previous host. This turned out to be a server configuration difference that their support team knew about but hadn’t documented in their migration guide.
Support interaction: Friendly and well-intentioned. Slow. Not always technically deep enough to solve problems without escalation.
Speed post-migration: Below average. The environmental credentials don’t compensate for performance.
The renewal reality: Fair pricing, no major surprises.
Overall: I respect what they’re trying to do. The product needs more investment before it matches the mission.
Host #7: The Oldest Name in the Room
A company that’s been around since the early days of the web. An institution in the industry.
The migration: Dated process. Their migration tools feel like they haven’t been significantly updated in years. The site transferred, but the interface for managing the migration was confusing enough that I made two configuration errors I then had to unpick.
What broke: PHP version mismatch. Their default PHP version was older than what my plugins required, and the process for changing it required navigating four different settings panels — none of which were labelled intuitively.
Support interaction: Knowledgeable but slow. This team clearly knows hosting deeply. They just seem stretched thin.
Speed post-migration: Average. Consistent, but not impressive.
The renewal reality: Moderate increases. Not as aggressive as some, more than others.
Overall: A company resting on a reputation earned a decade ago. The product hasn’t kept pace with the competition.
Host #8: Tremhost Again — The Return Migration
At the end of 30 days, I migrated back.
Not just because the experiment was over. But because after everything I’d experienced — the dropped images, the corrupted databases, the vanishing emails, the support agents reading from scripts, the renewal prices designed to catch you off guard — returning to a host where nothing broke and the support team actually helped felt genuinely significant.
The return migration: Handled by their team again. Four hours. Everything intact.
Total downtime across the return migration: 12 minutes.
What 30 Days and 8 Migrations Taught Me
Lesson 1: Migration quality is the real product test. Any host looks fine when nothing is happening. Migration is when complexity is forced into the open and you see what the host is actually made of.
Lesson 2: Email is always the hidden risk. Every migration that went badly had an email component that nobody warned me about. If your business runs on email — and every business does — confirm your host’s email migration process before you commit.
Lesson 3: Support quality scales inversely with marketing spend. The most advertised hosts had the worst support experiences. The hosts that spend their budget on infrastructure and staff rather than celebrity endorsements consistently performed better.
Lesson 4: The introductory price is fiction. Calculate what you’ll actually pay in year two before you sign up for year one. The real cost of hosting is the renewal rate, not the discount.
Lesson 5: African-market performance is still an afterthought for most global hosts. I ran all tests from multiple server locations. The performance drop for African visitors was significant on all but two hosts. If your audience is in Africa, this is not a minor consideration — it’s a fundamental one.
The Verdict
If you’re starting a new website, running an existing one, or planning to migrate: the hosting company you choose will either be something you never think about (because it just works) or something you think about constantly (because it keeps going wrong).
After 30 days and 8 migrations, I know which category each of these hosts falls into.
At Tremhost, your migration is handled for you, your site runs fast, your support questions get real answers, and the price you’re quoted is the price you’ll pay.
