I thought I would explain what I did to move from Extreme Member to using Wordpress with the Wishlist Member plugin on a different web host (Hostgator)

First I needed a host to serve up the membership site. I went with HostGator because you can have unlimited websites with them (I have lots of other sites on Godaddy.com that I am moving as well, so much cheaper in the end). Not only that since I am a new signup, Hostgator offered to move the entire site for free! That includes the wordpress files, videos and database.

I had some concerns about doing this as there are proprietary parts of Extreme Member (database tables/modifications, custom plugins, etc). We disabled all the plugins and added a few back one at a time. Things worked fine.

The other problem was with the theme. EM had modified some of the themes to work with their system. So I redownloaded the original theme I was using (Mandigo) and it re-uploaded it along with my original header graphic. It worked fine.

Then came the install of the Wishlist Member plugin. As you know that’s easy. FTP it to the server under the plugins folder and activate it within Wordpress. Enter some licence key info and you’re good to go.

Then before pointing the actual domain name (http://onlineguitarcoaching.com) at the new hostgator servers (I use a godaddy domain), you can actually modify your ‘hosts’ file (for windows) to point to the hostgator servers. So you can test it out on your local machine before actually making the change at the domain host (godaddy). Again thanks to Hostgator for teaching me this!

Don’t forget email – since I used an email such myname@onlineguitarcoaching.com on the original EM site, I needed to recreate this on the hostgator account (the original email was handled by godaddy servers). I also forward this to my hotmail account so I don’t have to login to a whole ton of different email accounts.

There is also the issue of the subscription payments, for transferring existing members. The easiest option is to just find those members in the new system and put them into a similar membership level (eg. Gold). Now since the payments in paypal are setup to talk to EM (not Wishlist), each month that update to the membership will fail but you can just manually remove the members after they cancel in Paypal. If you have a lot of members, that option may not work for you. So what Wishlist suggested is you put them in a temporary membership that expires after 30 days and then they have to pay via paypal to stay a member.

I’m not going to explain the actual wishlist member setup here, as they have tons of documentation and I might do some of my own later.

Then I tested the signup of a new account via paypal, and eventually refunded the money back to myself. When everything seemed good, I pointed the domain name at the hostgator servers and remove the entries from my local hosts file.

I’ve been paying $99/US per month for an amazing membership site service by Extreme Member. They provide hosting (no downloads, installs, etc), protected content via Wordpress, many membership level options (free, trial periods, etc), affiliate marketing, email marketing, forums – all integrated in one solution. At my guitar lesson membership site, it would take 5 members per month just to cover the costs of the software.

I just happened to find out that they now offer a $19/month offering as well as $49, $79 and $99/month. The main differences between the levels are the bandwidth, storage and member limits. So it’s a great way to start small and grow your site as you get new members. In my case one member will now pay for the entire site.

Extreme Member, a hosted membership service, now works with Clickbank and Authorize.net. By integrating with Clickbank you can take advantage of their large army of affiliates (even though EM has it’s own affiliate management).