Twenty-one site transfers for one web studio

A web studio has sent the same job over for seven years: move one WordPress site from one host to another, usually for five dollars, twenty-one times.

The objective

The client builds sites for their own customers and hands the hosting move over rather than doing it themselves. Each order is one site, files and database, onto a fresh install waiting at the new host.

None of these is complicated on its own. The reason it kept coming back for seven years is that each transfer went through without anything left to sort out afterwards.

What I did

I moved files and databases between hosting accounts, fitting the destination install rather than overwriting it wholesale.

I checked which site was actually live whenever the address I'd been given didn't behave as expected. On the most recent order the domain redirected to a second site, and the one sitting at the original address was broken, so I asked which one to move rather than guessing.

I asked to be added to the client's hosting account when the host demanded an authentication code, instead of passing codes back and forth on every login.

And I kept the price at five dollars for a site under a gigabyte across the whole seven years.

The result

Twenty-one orders between 2019 and April 2026. The most recent one was placed the same way as the first.