Moving a WordPress Blog

by Sapphire (March 1, 2005)

There are some tutorials out there on how to move a WordPress blog to a new domain and/or new server. They’re complicated, and there’s a lot that can go wrong.

When I went to move this blog, however, some of the tutorials were down for the weekend, and the others I found seemed to be adding a lot of steps. After all, I wasn’t changing domains - just hosts. Nothing else.

There’s a much simpler way to handle this situation, should you ever find yourself in it.

How I moved my blog from one host to another:

(1) Get the new hosting account set up. You should receive instructions on where to upload files before the domain nameservers resolve. It’ll be something like “http://12.12.12.123./~username” - the IP followed by the username in that format.

(2) Set up databases with the new host that use exactly the same db name, username and password as the first host. (This won’t work if your new host sets your base username to something different, but so far all of mine follow an identical pattern).

(3) Download a complete backup of your site from the original host onto your home computer. (Easily done from within the “Backup” program in your Cpanel.

(4) Go into the cpanel backup program at the NEW host, and upload your complete site from that backup.

(5) Now, go and change your nameservers to point your domain to the new host. It’ll take a few hours to resolve. At that point, if all of your settings were identical on both hosts, it should work immediately (mine did).

***NOTE: This procedure worked for me. I’m not an expert, and I’m not responsible if this doesn’t work. However, it shouldn’t cause you to lose any data or anything, because at no point am I advising you to trash files or anything. Whatever you do, keep a backup of the original site on your home computer, and then you’ll be able to fix whatever problems arise.

Posted in Blogging
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