… and why I haven’t been posting much content over the past few weeks.
It may seem strange to offer a “how-to-move-your-website” article when my own upgrade was less than seamless. Part of my trouble was that I was trying to do several things at once.
- Move webhost from a shared host to my own Virtual Private Server. Not being a webhost professional, configuring my various hosting tools was a learning experience in itself.
- Upgrade from WordPress 2.2.3 to 2.3.3.
- Change my site’s URI to get rid of the “/blog” in the title
Each one of these tasks is likely to cause disruption in itself, and I wanted to avoid three separate opportunities for mess-ups. So I opted to get it all over with at once (which probably an experienced project manager would always caution against), but I tried to minimise the risk by testing as much as possible in advance.
To be honest, I got a bit bored with poking around trying to figure out which plugins worked with the latest version of WordPress. So I only tested three or four and then went ahead anyway. Seeing that many of the bugs, when I finally moved, related to plugins which worked fine in the test site but not at the new webhost, I’m glad I cut that particular corner.
In outline, the process I followed for stepping from one place on the web to another was
- Install WordPress at the new webhost
- Transfer all images, files, plugins, theme templates over to the new webhost.
- Wipe the database of the new installation
- Export the complete database from the current blog and import it into the new database (with minor edits if necessary)
- Change the DNS settings
At this point, the standard plugin installation instructions read “… and you’re good to go”. But that’s never enough for me. Plus, those steps don’t include the WordPress upgrade and database cleanup.
So this article includes an intermediate step of trying all these things (except #5) on a test blog before making the final move. The test blog enabled me to ungrade the database and WordPress installation without disrupting the live site. I even tested step #5 on a much smaller live blog just to get comfortable that provided you complete steps 1-4 correctly, changing the DNS settings will do the job for you.
These notes assume that your existing webhost provides you with cPanel, and that you’re moving to a VPS with WHM and cPanel installed.
It also assumes you’ve got the PHP in your new VPS configured correctly, and that you have enough memory. For the full story, read this article, but in summary, you need PHP SuExec, with multibyte string support, and probably 512MB of minimum RAM.
The numbering of the sections on the following pages linked below do not match the outline 5-step process outlined above, because I go into more detail.
Now read on…
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