Moving your blog to a new server

Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 5:57 am

I am continuing the series of answers to questions that were asked in my pre-Christmas post. You can ask your questions to be added to the series by commenting on this or any other post.

Todayâ€™s question:

I have a question for you. What is the procedure to use if you want to transfer a current blog to a different server? Can you just back it up on the current server and then restore it to the new server?

Okay to answer this question I need to make an assumption and any regular reader knows how I feel about the word assume. I will assume that you are dealing with a shared hosting account. If you are moving it to a new account on your own dedicated server you can usually move it direct through the WHM which I will not be addressing. End of assumptions.

Copy all of the files off of your existing server to a folder and export the complete data base through phpMyAdmin to your computer. Set up the new account on your new server.

Create a data base on the new server. It is best to use the same names and password that you had on the old server. (Open the config.php file to find this information.) Do make sure that the location is the same. Most are set to local host. If your old host used a remote data base sever and your new one does not you will need to edit the config.php file but most will be using local host.

It will show like this in the config.php file if you are using local host.

define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

Now upload all of the files you originally downloaded in the same structure that you had them on the previous server.

Note: It is important that if the blog was in the root (public_html) or a sub folder like blog that it is in the same place on the new server.

Import the data base to the new one you created using phpMyAdmin.

Now you can change the nameservers for the domain to point to your new server and you should be good to go.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.

After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.

If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.