My Process: Moving to a New Webhost – Part 3

In my last post, I mentioned that I was moving the DNS over to my new host, and if you are reading this, then you are seeing the newly hosted site on WiredTree rather than Host Gator.

I want to say again, that Host Gator has been, and continues to be really great to me, but I wanted to move all my hosting under one account for me to manage better.

Mistake in Moving the WordPress Blog

One of the biggest mistakes I made in moving this site to its new hosting was getting overly excited about setting it up via Subversion. Instead of moving the site over from Host Gator to WiredTree and then setting it up to be able to be upgraded through SVN, I downloaded the latest stable release of WordPress through SVN and then had to deal with the situation I had made.

I imported the posts, moved over my themes and plugins folder, but of course all of the settings that were in the database, were not exported from the old site, and I had to set up all of my plugins once again.

Not that big of a problem, but a bit annoying. It did allow me to audit my plugins, and only activate those that I really needed.

FTP Issues

Another issue I had, which seems to be something on my end, rather than my hosting is my inability to transfer everything I had for the site in one fell swoop. I had to uploaded only a few folders at a time or it would time out. It was very frustrating.

File Ownership and Permissions

One other side effect of using Subversion the way that I did was that I was root when I installed the blog via the tool, and that meant that all files were owned and grouped under root. This meant that when I logged in using the normal user name and password I had, I wasn’t able to overwrite files or folders at all. A quick chown and chgrp fixed this, but I have definitely learned my lesson.

DNS Issues

One of the cooler things of having a VPS with WiredTree is that I have my own domain name server address. This also created a small issue for me as I wasn’t used to setting it up. I wanted ns1.xfep.com, but Xfep.com wasn’t pointed to my new IP address yet. Thankfully, I was able to figure it out with a quick bit of support from WiredTree, and adjusted my Godaddy information as needed.

This means that when dealing with the rest of my domains, they will all point to the name servers that I have created, which, to me, is very cool.

The Next Steps

Now that this blog is set up correctly, and there doesn’t seem to be any huge issues I have to iron out, I can work on streamlining the process and move all of the other sites I currently have over to my VPS.

Hopefully, I can get all of this done by the end of this month, and start canceling all of my other hosting.

Originally posted on May 21, 2008 @ 1:25 pm

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