HostGator Migration Breaks Backup Buddy

Those of you who have been HostGator customers for a long time may be aware that HostGator is migrating older customers to new servers. This is a result of HostGator’s acquisition by EIG not too long ago. All HostGator legacy accounts are being moved to EIG’s Utah server farm.

HostGator customers are receiving emails telling them that their account will be migrated within 48-72 hours. If you are one of those customers and are using Backup Buddy to backup your site, be aware that the HostGator migration breaks Backup Buddy.

So, What’s the Problem?

If you log in to your CPanel prior to the migration, you will see that your account’s web root directory path is something like the following:

/home/userid/public_html

After the migration, the path will be different. In my case, mine is now:

/home3/userid/public_html

The migration is simply a copy of all the files and data from your old server to the new one. Backup Buddy’s settings contain the server file path to where the backups are stored. This is to afford the flexibility of storing them somewhere else if you prefer.

For example, many like to store their backups above the web root so that they are not accessible via the web. This is an extra precaution because even the default backup directory under the web root is protected with several system files that disallow just anyone from accessing the directory.

In any case, when you log into your WordPress site on the new server, you’ll see that Backup Buddy has stored the old path using “home”. This causes some very weird behavior, primarily increasing the size of the backup by at least a factor of 10. One client’s normal backup is just over 300MB and had jumped to 14.3GB!

How To Fix The Issue

Fortunately, the fix for this is simple. As soon as you’re notified that the migration is complete, log in to your WordPress site. Under the Backup Buddy section in the left sidebar of the admin dashboard, click Settings. Near the top of the page, to the right of the text box that contains the default backup storage path is a link that reads “Reset Default”. Clicking that link updates the path to the correct one and resolves the problem.

When the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page is clicked, a warning message will appear at the top of the page stating that the default path has been changed and existing backups have been moved to the new location.

It is highly recommended to run a backup manually after this setting is saved just to be sure that everything is running correctly.

Anything Else To Look Out For?

Moving from one server to another means that the name servers for your domains will have changed. HostGator forwards the old name servers to the new ones for a period of time after the migration, but you should change them as soon as you’re notified that the migration is complete. Leaving the name servers at the old values has been known to cause some heartburn with various plugins.

If your domains are registered through HostGator, they will fix the name server entries for you. Most of us, however, have our domains registered elsewhere and will need to go into the registrar account and update all the domains that point to the HostGator server.

My account was just migrated this morning and I was warned that until all migrations are complete to this server, things will be a tad slow, but will be much better once those migrations are done. “Temporary inconvenience, permanent improvement”, eh? We’ll see…

John Sawyer