Pro Computer Geek

The other day, my mail server went down yet again! Arrrrr! So I decided it was time to bite the bullet and get rid of my old hosting company and move to a new, faster and more reliable one. The only problem was I had a resellers account with several WordPress blogs on the various accounts. As it happened, moving the WordPress sites was not as hard as I initially thought……

Site Backup

First of all you need to backup you WordPress blog files, plug-ins, images etc (normally in you http_docs folder) using your ftp software. I use Cute FTP. Navigate to your blog directory and download your entire blog to your hard drive….

If your blog is in your route directory, you can just use the “backups” section in your fantastico menu and download your blog in zipped format.

Then login to your cpanel normally http://www.yourwebsite.com/cpanel. From the main menu, click on the backup icon and the click the MySQL database name you want to backup. In my example, my MySQL database is called “wrdp1”. Save this with the other backed up files of your WordPress blog.

Domain DNS

Now you have backed up you WordPress blog files and blog MySQL database to your local hard drive, you have to setup your new hosting account and point the DNS of your domain name to your new hosting name servers (check with your domain hosting if you don’t know how to do this).

The Hosting I opted for is Hostgator. I highly recommend this hosting company. I run several websites from my resellers account and have be so for several months with no down time and my emails always now work!!

Uploading Your Site

Once your domain name has propagated (moved over to your new hosting server), login to your sites new cpanel. In Fantastico, install a fresh copy of WordPress to your desired directory. Now upload your backed up WordPress files from your hard drive (this may differ slightly depending on which way you did your backup previously) saying “yes to all” about overwriting files, to your new WordPress directory…

Next, from the cpanel homepage, select the “backups” icon. Click on the browse button on the MySQL section of the page and point to where you backed up you MySQL database and then press update… Don’t touch the browser while this is going on!!!!

MySQL New User

Once this is done you are nearly there. All you have to do now is add a user to your MySQL database. Do this from the cpanel homepage. Click on the “MySQL Database” icon and in the current users section, put in a username and password and click “cerate user”.

Updating your WordPress config file

Now the last little bit you need to do is update the “wp-config.php” in the root directory of you WordPress blog again using you ftp program. Edit the file and change the username and password and the name of your MySQL database to the one you have just created…

That should be it. Don’t forget, Hostgator is the best hosting company I have used so check them out here!