How I Moved My Website Hosting to Hostinger With the Help of AI

A dead-end call center, three failed payment attempts, and Kodee — Hostinger’s AI migration assistant — that actually delivered. Here is exactly how the switch went down.

Our website had a problem that no amount of patience could fix. For us, the site is not a storefront — it is how we stay in touch with the rest of the brethren scattered across different places. It was living on a .africa domain setup that kept coming under attack, and every attack meant the same two things: real visitors locked out during downtime, and email crawling in late, sometimes hours after it was sent. That is not a small inconvenience when the whole point of the site is staying connected. Something had to change, and it had to change properly.

First Stop: Amazon (And Why It Didn’t Work Out)

Reputation counts for a lot, so Amazon was the obvious first call. I signed up, logged in, and hit a wall almost immediately: the interface was built for a different kind of user, not for someone who needed a fast, clean migration without a learning curve.

So I reached out to customer care. To their credit, a real human answered — calling in from South Africa — and escalated the issue to technical support. That is where things slowed down. Responses came in late, the conversation lost momentum, and the promised follow-up email after the call never arrived. Even as I write this, that email still has not come through.

In the meantime, I reached out to a few software engineers I knew personally, hoping one of them could just take it off my hands. Most either refused outright or simply went quiet on the request — it was too simple a job to bother with, apparently. Waiting that long, with no one willing to help, was the deciding factor — so I asked Madavi.

A Recommendation, and a Timing Consideration

Around this time, a discount code came through from Madavi — 20% off — alongside a straightforward recommendation: Hostinger. It lined up well with something already flagged among the brethren. Given the xenophobic attacks unfolding in South Africa at the time, the preference was to avoid routing more of our activity through South Africa-based vendors for the time being. Hostinger fit both the timing and the budget.

Choosing a Package and the Payment Gauntlet

Once the package was identified, checkout should have been the easy part. It was not.

Three payment methods failed in a row before M-Pesa Global finally pushed the transaction through. If you are paying for hosting from this side of the world, it is worth knowing that going in — have M-Pesa Global ready as a backup before you even start.

The card said no three times. M-Pesa said yes on the first try.

Migrating With Kodee, Hostinger’s AI Assistant

Payment done, the real work began — and this is where Kodee actually earned its keep. Hostinger’s AI migration assistant offered a guided migration option straight after checkout. It walked through backing up and downloading the files from the old website, step by step, with none of the guesswork that had made the Amazon interface feel so unfriendly.

One detail that would have been easy to miss: Kodee specifically reminded me to also download the SQL database files, separately from the website files themselves. A site is not just its files. Its content, settings, and structure live in that database, and skipping that step is one of the most common ways a migration goes sideways.

• Backed up and downloaded all website files
• Exported and downloaded the SQL database files separately
• Confirmed both were complete before moving forward

The Free Domain, and What Comes Next

As part of the package, a free website domain came with the move. That is the next piece of this story — deciding how and where to put it to use, now that the hosting side is finally stable.