Site transfer between hosts

Little background on initial request and what we have run into so far. Looking for some guidance on resolving this for the client as soon as possible.

I was asked to help a friends coworker with moving their site from one host to another. Simple task, done it plenty of times, but never with a wordpress site. So back in December, i tried to back up everyhing from the original host, files, database, followed all the steps found on transferring a site. Once i had everything backed up and felt good that we had everything, we attempted to do the transfer to yahoosmallbusiness account and doing so of course took down the site on the original host, since the DNS was changed to point to the new one, but then trying to load all the backed up files on the host, didnt work, site was down for 2 days, before we got the original host to get the site back up on their servers. SO what we decided and chose to do was setup a new domain name, .net version of the .com, i setup the new site with the same wordpress template and got all pages and data set up again. So currently have 2 sites, .com on the old host, .net on the new host. BUT we want to migrate the .com domain name to point to the .net server and have the .net domain expire in a year.
Without asking the client to spend more money on services and packages, can anyone offer advice or guide me thru what i need to do in order to move the .com domain which is pointing to a wordpress site, and point it to the .net server and have it be the main domain name for that hosting package? Is that possible? Both are wordpress sites, i dont need any data from the old host, i just need to point the domain name to the .net host without causing the site to be down for 2 days.. IF we could migrate the data, may be worth a shot, because there are some styling issues with the .net site, but if not no biggy.

Im posting here because following a wordpress migration how to, didnt work and looking for some help since ive never worked with wordpress until this site.

In the past, i would back up all data/pages from a host server, sign up for a new host without any domain linked to it, setup all the pages and make sure things worked and then go in and do a DNS change for the name to link to the account..

What are my options at this point. I only want to point the .com name to the new hosting server?

• This topic was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Jan Dembowski.