diTii.com | D' Technology Weblog

Moving Process: Here I’m writting down, the steps that I’ve used to migrate my WordPress setup & domain from DreamHost to Media Temple. I’ve devided this post into two parts, because of the post is going to be large. This part will discuss MySQL database backup process.

The Basic Idea —: Checklist:

Here’s the checklist for moving your site to another host. Since, I’ve a working installation on diTii.com, I need to do the following:

1. Buy new hosting (gs) Grid-Service from Media Temple, while keeping the old host (DreamHost) active, so I can move files.
2. Move my email mailboxes over to Media Temaple.
3. Move my WordPress files and the MySQL database over to Media Temaple.
4. Move any other non-WordPress services that might exist on the old host (like OpenX etc.) site.
5. Testing the WordPress installation on Media Temaple.
6. Change the official name servers for the ditii.com to use the new Media Temple (gs).

Step 1:

WordPress Database Backup:

1. I use WP-DBManager plugin of Lester Chan to mange my WordPress MySQL database, so obvisouly, I took the backup as usual. I would recommend this plugin, if you’re not already using it.
   

   Plugin based:

   1. Download WP-DBManager, and unzip to a local folder.
   2. Upload unzipped folder to your wp-content/plugins folder
   3. Activate from the admin panel
   4. Click “Database” from the navigation menu and go to options, setup your default preferences and click save.
   5. If everything goes fines, click on “databse” and do a MySQL database backup.
   6. You entire database is backup and compressed.

   Export as XML

2. You can also backup your WordPress db, by going WordPress admin panel, then settings —> Manage —> Export, and there export to XML file.
   

   PHPMyAdmin

3. If you’re comfortable with PHPMyAdmin, check out this step-by-step guide with screenshot or follow below steps:
   1. Log in to your PHPMyAdmin using the URL that your web hosting company has given, on  DreamHost, it’s mysql.yourdomain.com, the enter your username and password.
   2. Select the database from the dropdown, you’d like to back up from the column on the left
   3. Click on “Export” from the top set of tabs
   4. Select the tables from the list that you would like to backup. If you want to backup the entire database hit “Select All”
   5. Select “Structure and data” from the bullet list
   6. Selection boxes:
      • Check the “Add ‘drop table’” box if you are moving the database to a new location and don’t want to merge the old table with an existing one
      • Click the “Save as file” box
      • Use the “Save as file zipped” if you want to compress the backup before downloading it from the server
   7. Click the “Go” button, when prompted save the file to your local computer

   Note: PHPMyAdmin cann’t handle large databases, so if you get any error you can use either plugin based or straight MySQL code will help.

   MySQL Commands

    Note: To use MySQL commands, you’ll need to have SSH access, most web hosting companies provide SSH (Unix Shell).

1. Log into your server via SSH and cd into your public folder “/httpdocs/” or “/html/” or “/yourdoamin.com/”
2. Enter the following command:

   mysqldump --add-drop-table -h db01.example.net -u Username -p dbname# | bzip2 -c > dbname.sql.bz2

• omit the ‘–add-drop-table’ argument if you’ll want to merge this backup with an existing database upon restore
• Where Username is replaced by the MySQL username.
• Replace dbname# with the name of the database to be backed up.
• Replace dbname.sql.bz2 with what you’d like to name the backup.
3. Enter your MySQL password at the prompt. If you don’t know it you can reset it in your webcontrol or Plesk admin panel.

Finally, at this moment, we’ve taken the backup of our WordPress MySQL database. In the second part of this series post, I’ll show you “how to backup your WordPress installation and transfering files to Media Temple, pre-testing WordPress installation, Name Server change, and finally DNS propagation.

Note:

• All above methods are fully tested and works, it’s a matter of your choice, which method you select to backup.
• Note down the location of your backup file, we’re going to transfer it later on Media Temple. It’s recommend to move it to your site root folder.

Read: Part 2

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