Moving Wordpress From One Host To Another

I’ve recently change my hosting arrangement to a paid host. My old free host at byethost.com was excellent and I still recommend it for anyone trying to host their WordPress simply because it has all the paid host requirement and more.

The only problem I had with them is that the FTP connection timed out 80% of the time. And for someone who likes to modify their templates all the time this is not good. I still have couple of my other sites with them.

www.adsensechamber.com is set up with WordPress 2.5.1 and has all the plug ins set up with slightly modified themes. My target is to minimize down time and transfer everything as is. The WordPress on the new host should also has the same version number. Step by step what I did was

At the new host server

1. Install WordPress using fantastico or whatever script installation provided by the new host.

2. Log in to the new installation, upload plugins, upload theme. Remember, the plugins must be the same with the old server configuration. If you want to install new plugins you can do that later.

3. If plugins page says there is new version of a particular plugins and you want to get it, upgrade it now.

4. Activate all the required plugins. Majority of plugins will work straight away but some are probably not because you are installing on a sub directory. Take notes but leave it for now.

5. Activate the theme and tweak and do whatever you need to do with the theme.

6. View the new site and make sure everything is okay.

At the old host server.

7. Log in to PhpMyadmin and select the WordPress database for the old installation.

8. Go to the root of the database where you can see all the tables are listed.

9. Select the export tab and when you get to the next page (default option should be fine), on the lower left screen click the Go button.

10. The next page will show a big text box with all you data in it, select all of the text inside the text box and copy and save it to a text editor, notepad sometimes mess things up, I use Context for this, free and do what it supposed to do.

11. Save it incase the power is off before you finished.

Back to the new host server

12. Log in to PhpMyadmin at the new server and select the WordPress database for the new installation.

13. Again, go to the root of the database where you can see all the tables are listed.

14. Now you can do step 9 again on this server incase anything goes wrong or you can skip in and just drop all the tables.

15. When there are no tables on the database anymore, go to the SQL tab and copy and paste the data from step 10. If the data is too big, you can paste it in steps, just make sure that you are pasting table structure with table content each time.

16. When you finish doing this you won’t be able to log in to your new installation anymore, that’s ok.

At the domain registrar

17. Login to your registrar and change your name server to your new host name server. This info is usually available from the new host info page.

Thats it, once the new name server propagate, your new WordPress host will be available, in the mean time your old WordPress host is. As soon as your new WordPress is accessible just have a look for small things such as permalink, comment, plugins etc to make sure everything is all right.