kungfukarl

I just switched hosts for performance/reliability reasons. This is what I did:

1. Get a new acct. with a different service and transfer over your domain information. I’ll let you figure that out yourself. Any good host will help you through the process.

2. Used phpMyAdmin on my old host to export my WordPress databse (the database name is in your wp-config.php) to an *.sql file on my own computer. Be sure to export _all_ the fields.

3. Used FTP to make a copy of my entire wordpress directory and all subdirectories from the old host.

4. Installed WP via Fantastico on the new host.

5. Used the copy of phpMyAdmin on my new host to import my old database.

4. Checked to see if the database names in wp-config and phpMyAdmin matched. If not, modify wp-config to reflect the new name.

5. Add in a new MySQL database user with full permissions to this new database. Give it a tough password.

6. Make sure wp-config reflects the username/password you make in step 5.

7. In my case, I then copied over my plugin and theme directory from the FTP download in step 3. Copy the wp-admin/ directory if you had any scripts that put stuff there. It may just be easier to reinstall all of your plugins.

8. Start dealing with any little bugs that pop up. But for god’s sakes don’t alter your blog until you’re sure the new DNS entries have propagated. If they haven’t, you’ll be altering things on your old server.

An easy way to check if your personal DNS server is synched up is to create a dummy html file or something on your new server, and see if you can access it. If you can, you’re good to go. If not, get some sleep and try in the morning.

There are a couple of different ways of doing this whole process, but I think this is the most explicit.

For what it’s worth, I use BlueHost now and so far they have been very good. I have no relationship with them than otherwise being a customer. It’s up to you to make your own informed choice.

Good luck.

Thanks for the help.

Thank you for the support and the points about the Archives page(s). I’m hacking the original theme as I go along, and my UI choices never made it to the archives template.

Resiny: Is there still a pixel problem? It looks fine on my computer. Maybe I can compare the image size vs. the column width as specified in the CSS again.

The Sidebar is an ongoing project. I added a little something nice called “Stay In Touch” and presented the data as well as my CSS/XHTML skills allow me. The titles & PDF icons in the “Electronic Ink” section are probably going to start floating left and right to create a two column effect and distance the text from the graphics.

The single.php and post.php will have to have their RSS parts fit the front page somehow.

Thanks for the reviews. I fixed the banner graphic problem. This fix actually worked on the first time.