Hey everybody, I’m back up and running, with all my previous posts restored.
I’ll do my best to keep this post short yet detailed.
So quick backstory first, in Summer of 2017 I decided to move switch webhosts from A Small Orange to Siteground and during the process I screwed up or at least I thought. Making the full cpanel backup and downloading it to my computer was the best and right idea. Thinking I could just upload the files to my new host was not. There are differences in the database prefixes which are attached to your cpanel name. For example the cpanel name for my A Small Orange account was anthony316 while the cpanel name for my former SiteGround account (since I let my original account lapse and started a new one) I think was anthony14. So all my wordpress MySQL databases and tables had the old prefix and I did not know how to change it. At that time I was very consumed and preoccupied by my W2 jobs so I just left the archive on my OneDrive to figure out later and started from scratch. After being sticker-shocked by the renewal fee for Siteground I made one more hosting jump although this time I tried to do things differently.
So there are multiple ways to transfer your website from one host to another, the best usually the easiest ways are plugins and sometimes even your host offers options. So using one plugin I created a backup using the plugin, downloaded that plugin plus a cpanel backup, then promptly deleted my WordPress website. Following a quick guide YouTube video made by the plug in developer I restore the website on my newest hosting account unsuccessfully.
Turns out that only the paid pro version of the plugin automatically restores the database.