Hey mates, some weeks ago I changed my hosting and I had to move all my websites from the old hosting to the new one. May be it’s seem like an easy task but it’s not when you are involved with databases.

The problem I got when I was moving this blog was related with its databases. I followed the steps recomended by almost every hosting but without reason, the procedure failed many times… So I decided to stop following those steps and do it my way.

Migrating a WordPress Blog

The following one is a list of steps, that you should follow to change your wordpress blog of hosting successfully:

1. Backup your data: First of all, you need to make a backup of your blog. You can do this by connecting via FTP and downloading everything in the root directory of your wordpress installation, i.e. download everything in /public_html/ or /public_html/blog, or wherever your installed wordpress. Save all those folders and files into a folder on your computer.
2. Backup your databases: This is where the recommendations of the hostings are wrong. First, log into your cpanel and go to phpMyAdmin and when it loads, click Export. After that, select the database you want to export – in this case the one which manages wordpress. By default there will be some options selected: export as SQL, Add IF NOT EXISTS, Add AUTO_INCREMENT value, Enclose table and field names with backquotes, Complete inserts, Extended inserts and Use hexadecimal for BLOB.
3. Save the database: You should not change any of the options mentioned in the step 2, it’s not necessary. I read in many websites that you should check “Add DROP TABLE / VIEW / PROCEDURE / FUNCTION” but that’s totally false! If you check that you won’t be able to import your database in the near future… So after verifying all those settings, check Save As File and press GO. Don’t check any related with compression.
4. Change wp-config.php: This file contains basic configurations of your wordpress blog. Open it in your computer and change the info related with your database name and password, user etc etc… Otherwise you will get an error of database once you upload it to the new server.
5. Upload your blog to the new hosting: Congratulations! You backed up your data from your old hosting with success, but this not ends here. Now, upload all those folders and files which you downloaded in the step 1 to the new hosting. Where to upload it? In the same directory it was in the old hosting!.
6. Create a new database: Log into the cpanel of the new hosting and go MySQL Databases. Create a new database (it will the one which will handle your blog in this new server… if you want, you can give it the same name of the old database). Add a new user to that new database with full privileges.
7. Import your old database: Go to phpMyAdmin. Then click import, selecting the database you want to fill in. In this case, select the database created in the step 5. Select the database from your computer and then change the Character from utf8 to latin1 and then press GO. Why to latin1? In order to verify this, open the backup of your database on your computer with a notepad or another text processor and search for the word “Character”. You will see the character type of your database, which is latin1 for default. Note: If your character type is another one different of latin1, you should select it in phpmyadmin or you will fail importing the database.
8. Change the nameservers: If everything is right, then you should go into your domain manager (godaddy or whatever…) and change the nameservers of your domain to point it to the new hosting. Once you do that, your domain will be bouncing between the old host and the new one, and that could take some days, it’s not instantaneously.

Recommendations

Due to the nameservers bouncing, I highly recommend you NOT to alter anything on your blog: add a new post, comment, plugin… Why? Because you won’t know if you edited the blog of the new hosting or of the new one.

When I did it some weeks ago, I had the wonderful idea of publishing a new post and the next day, many people sent me an email reporting a 404 error. They tried to visit the post through their RSS feed but they got and error because in the new server, that link didn’t exist!. For my luck, I copied/pasted the post from my Google Reader and I published it again ( yes, I’m subscribed to my own feed in order to see how things look lol ).

Also, remember that you can contact your hosting/domain manager if you have any problem – Good luck!