HI Brock,
I’ll offer up for your consideration a service from ithemes.com that I’ve used for several years called BackupBuddy.
BackupBuddy is a paid subscription, but at a price point that’s pretty painless. It does several things well including WordPress site migration that I used to move a site from the development directory at one host to a different URL at a different host. First you make a complete backup of the site including the DB. Then you put their program called importbuddy (I think) into the new directory, tell it things like domain and directory information, DB location, username and password, and upload the full backup of the dev (production in your case) site. It parses the backup and replaces old table and link references with current information.
I don’t want to sound like a salesman, but you’ll want to review BackupBuddy along with whatever else you consider. Their backup archives are easy to download, and they include 1TB of online backup storage with the subscriptions. I make and download a backup after every session of changes, and they have cron backups in case you need to automatically protect things like blog posts. You can store the backups either in the wp-content folder where they natively go, download to your local machine, send them to their online repository or any combination.
And yes - the backup restored just fine. Always a critical part of a backup plan!
I just saw a 25% popup discount coupon for your first year of any of their plans, and I believe that my annual renewal for a 10-site plan was discounted at about that rate, too.
One of their utilities is called Server Tools that looks at your host’s server and rates pass/fail on a bunch of parameters. Dreamhost’s virtual account that I’m using, for example, only allocates 90MB to my sites and ServerTools recommends 256MB, so it flags that as a fail for me. My several sites still run fine, albeit none of them have much traffic, but I really need to check on getting more RAM made available because X frequently has problems.
That’s all. Stop by ithemes and check them out.
Happy Migration!
Alan