Migrating Wordpress Blog to New Hosting Provider Part 1 – Backing Up
Posted by: dragonblogger // Category: blogging
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I had to move three of my hosted wordpress blogs from my current hosting provider (Dreamhost) to a new hosting provider (Hostmonster). This is a large task for anyone who is thinking about changing hosting providers and porting over your wordpress blog. You have to remember to backup all the physical files (themes, plugins, images, uploads…) and export your wordpress SQL database to bring it over to your new hosting company.
Here are steps on how you can do a full backup of your existing Wordpress blog so you have everything you need to bring it to the new hosting provider:
Step 1 – SQL Database Backup
You can’t rely on the Wordpress XMR/XML “Export” inside the wp-admin, I have tried and it trips up and only takes a handful of posts because special characters used in posts, titles and such can break the XML data file so that it won’t truly grab all of your posts on the import. The only true way to backup your wordpress database is to backup the SQL database manually. It his highly recommended you do this by leveraging the “MyPHPAdmin” that your hosting provider has, almost all of them use this application to allow you access to your SQL Database.
You would log into your MyPHPAdmin and select your Wordpress Database, then click the Export Option and make sure all of your tables are selected.
Then check mark “Save as File” and export your database.
This will create a .sql file that you can use to import into your new hosting provider, if you want to use compression go ahead and check mark “zip” output file so that you can have a compressed file.
This SQL file now contains all of your comments, admins, posts, tracebacks and any extra tables created by the plugins you installed for wordpress. Note: You should create no new content on your blog at this point, if you do you will need to create another SQL dump to include the latest posts/comments…etc.
Step 2 – Backup your Wordpress Files
This step requires that you have either a file manager program in your existing hosting provider (if you have a hosting provider that provides CPanel you can use “Unlimited FTP” or another FTP type client they offer). Or else if you have ftp access to your website (and you can always try directly) download the WinSCP client and try connecting to “www.
You will want to backup the following files and all sub-directories:
- wp-content/uploads (all subdirs, or you will lose your images, and media you insert into posts)
- wp-content/themes/ (you only need to select the specific themes you want to keep under here)
- wp-content/plugins/ (you will want to backup all active plug-ins because your SQL database includes the tables for them already)
- (any other custom folders) this may include a /images or any other folders you may have manually created on your web server.
These files will need to be stored and transferred into the exact same file structure on your new hosting provider.
Summary:
The above 2 steps should ensure that you have everything you need to port over your existing Wordpress Blog to a new hosting provider. The next part of this installment will cover how to setup the wordpress blog on the new hosting provider and import all of your data.
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November 13th, 2009 at 10:05 am
This is very useful tutorial and one that I am looking forward for the second part to include in my personal “data base” of very important matters. This will certainly be of great help should one decide to move to a new home. For starters, I think it is wise just to back up all your data. Thanks
Ditesco´s last blog ..Forget Making Money Online – It Sucks #2
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November 13th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Ljuckily when it comes to doing backups and stuff I rely on my host and the hosting package we have, but I will say this serves as an excellent tutorial for people unlike myself that put way too much trust into the web hosts ability.
I don’t even like writing about web hosting issues, I start to twitch.
Extreme John´s last blog ..Google Custom Search Now on Extreme John
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November 13th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
Yeah its rough, I didn’t know how to use phpmyadmin before using it to do this. I am a Unix Sys Admin for many years so I know my way around unix file systems very well, this is why I always choose Linux hosting providers instead of windows web hosting.
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November 14th, 2009 at 10:43 am
I don’t have much experience with phpmyadmin, but I did exactly like that when I recently moved to a different server – worked flawlessly. Exporting using the “SQL” option from phpmyadmin and importing in another phpmyadmin – no problems.
I would probably also suggest to “zipped” the file – otherwise it could become quite big.
Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..Free Google Wave Invites Giveaway For Tweeps
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December 3rd, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Hi,
First, thank you for this tutorial, it provided things step by step and is very much detailed. Second, I am sorry that you had to switch hosting providers, but maybe it worked out for the best.
I am relatively new to this WordPress site thing and can see that I have TONS more to learn. Most of what you were talking about looked like a foreign language, so it was nice to find your site and did all the hardwork of putting it into steps.
Great post!
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