Migration of a site is a fundamental part on the process of moving to another hosting service and even when you need to take backups of your site. In this article we are going to learn the benefits that you can have by using Infinite Uploads on your site, by reducing the total size of your website and speeding up the migration process and backups.

Infinite Uploads is useful to improve performance and speed of your site by offloading all the images and videos from your media library onto the cloud. By using the service you also get access to a transparent CDN that will distribute the files around the world, but there is another neat feature that you can get on top of speed improvements for your site and that is storage savings.

By using Infinite Uploads to store the files and by taking advantage of our plugin that will automatically sync the site with your account, you can move away from your files being stored physically on your hosting service, hence, reducing the total load on your storage and your hosting plan requirements.

Since the plugin will allow you to delete your local files once you’ve connected and synced to our cloud, you will reduce the amount of storage being used on your hosting. And there is another neat advantage of doing that, and that is for backups & migrations.

For the purpose of this review, we will use a testing site stored on a very fast hosting service. We’ve uploaded many videos and images onto the site for a total media library size of 9.64GB (10GB). We will then migrate a website without Infinite Uploads enabled and with Infinite Uploads enabled and the local files deleted. We will compare the time it takes and review the results. Pretty simple, right?

This is our site, ready to connect & sync, but we won’t do that just yet, we will proceed and run a full Export & Import of the site by using the same hosting and the All in One WP Migration plugin. Then we will do the same with Infinite Uploads enabled. The results will shock you.

Migration without Infinite Uploads

For the purpose of this test, we will do our best to avoid internet speed slowdowns and resource allocation issues. The objective is to avoid any external bottlenecks as much as we can so we get the clearest results possible.

We will run this test on very fast hosting with up to 12-threads of processing power without any limitations and running off a set of SSDs on RAID1. We will then run the Exporter from a machine hosted in the same datacenter as the hosting server for 1ms latency between one and the other. The Import will then be executed into the same server.

Take into consideration that this is most certainly an ideal scenario and that other factors will take precedence when you try to do a normal export/import, such as:

• Hosting limitations set forth by the hosting service, such as CPU or disk IOPs resource allocation
• Bandwidth offered by the hosting company
• ISP Speed on your local internet to and from the hosting company
• Speed of the storage device on your hosting account

By taking into account all those factors, the migration process could take from 1.5 up to 5x more than it could take if all those factors are not being considered, so the results depicted here for migrations without Infinite Uploads could be much much worse in a normal environment.

For completeness, after all the tests were done on our fast hosting, we then tried to do the same migration by using a normal shared hosting service. The results will be shown at the end.

Exporting the Site

We will use the very efficient All in One WP Migration plugin to create an export file of the site in question.

Once the site is fully backed up the plugin will give you the option to download the file.

A massive 10GB file that we need to download.

By not getting limited by the CPU/Hosting the download is done at 112MB/s, that’s 896Mbits of bandwidth. The file was downloaded in 1.2 minutes.

Importing the Site

Now, we are going to clean the site (blank) and then import our backup, by using All in One WP Migration plugin again and importing that 10GB file.

The import process is slower than the export as it involves more CPU usage.

Just so you have an idea, we can show you the actual bandwidth being used. A mere 186Mbps off a gigabit connection. Remember this server is connected to the hosting server by gigabit uplink and both servers are in the same datacenter.

After many minutes, the import is finally done. If you need to know before we show you the results at the end. It took us 4 minutes to export the file and 11 minutes to import it under the most ideal conditions.

Migration with Infinite Uploads

Now, let’s see how Infinite Uploads manages to shave off all those minutes on a migration.

We are going to connect our site with the library and sync the files.

Sync time!!

After the files are in-sync, we are going to delete them from our local storage.

Exporting the site

We will use the functionality built into All in One WP Migration to skip the export of the media library, since all our files are already pointing to Infinite Uploads and there are no local copies.

Now we run the exporter…

Our full website without the media library barely took any time to fully export. A mere 73MB backup file.

Now, let’s compare the two.

Suffice to say we won’t show you the import process because you’ve already seen it. The results now are as decisive as they can be, the export only took us 5 seconds, the import process, which is slower than the export, a mere 7 seconds!

Results

Now, with all our benchmarks complete, here are the results. We’ve added the numbers for a normal shared hosting service without the benefits of having dedicated CPU cores and bandwidth. The regular data is the migration being done without Infinite Uploads active, whereas the Infinite Uploads data is taken by having Infinite Uploads active and local files deleted.

The results are clear. If you’re planning on migrating a website the normal way, be prepared to wait for some time. The results are normalized in seconds. For a dedicated hosting hooked into a gigabit connection and with direct-access to the backup server, the entire migration took about 934 seconds, about 15.5 minutes for a 10GB site. By this estimate, a 20GB site could take up to 30 minutes to migrate, but this is an ideal scenario!.

When using a normal shared hosting service with our dedicated remote desktop server, the entire migration took about 1276 seconds to complete, having less CPU resources and bandwidth played a role indeed. This translated to minutes is about 21.26 minutes. For a 20GB site you can expect at least 40 minutes for the entire migration to complete and this is taking into account a gigabit internet connection in ideal circumstances!.

If you need to add your own ISP speed to the mix, be prepared to add at least an hour up to several hours more, depending on your download/upload speeds.

In contrast, by using Infinite Uploads and deleting the local media library files, the backup file, being a mere 70MB file, took only 12 seconds to complete. In contrast, even the shared hosting service didn’t have any issues exporting and importing the site, taking no more than 15 seconds. Only 3 seconds more than our dedicated service with more bandwidth and CPU at our disposal.

Summary

Using Infinite Uploads to store the media library and completely skipping the local storage has a tremendous impact on migration speed. The results are so brutal that it’s hard to compare the two at a meaningful scale. With this in mind, a huge 30GB site that could take you several hours to migrate on a home connection, could very much take a few seconds, provided you have Infinite Uploads enabled and local content deleted.

But don’t just take our word for it, signup for a free trial of Infinite Uploads and see how drastically you can optimize your migration, staging, and backup processes!