Tranfer Blog To Another Webhost

This blog post will talk about the experience done in tranfering one blog to another host… and hey, the misspelled tranfer word really was done intentionally, ayt?

I have read a couple of posts just like this, where a blogger moves his blog either from one domain name to another or from one web hosting company to another… I never thought that I would be doing the same thing for one of my blog…

To keep the tradition alive.. nyahaha, here’s the things I did in transferring Pinoy Banda from Marvin’s Web (Registrar and webhost) to Godaddy (Registrar) and 000Webhost (Free hosting).

Background…

Pinoy Banda was set to expire on May 21, 2008 .. wait! That’s yesterday! hehehe… Instead of renewing the domain with my registrar, I transfer the domain name to GoDaddy.

But before that… Backup, Backup Backup

Did a little reading in transferring a WordPress blog to another host. I think the one I read was the one in wordpress Codex.. Go read that one if you’ll be transferring one of your own blog to another webhost.

The article says, if you’re moving a WordPress blog from one webhosting company to another (or basically Moving Your WordPress blog to another Host), all you have to do is to backup the necessary databases (in case you have more than one blog on that domain), backup your WordPress files (i.e., wp-content, wp-something and wp-something-else :)

So that’s what I did…

Read another article about backing up database using Mysql and/or phpadmin. I then logged in to PinoyBanda’s CPanel, use the “backup” feature of cpanel.

I downloaded my WordPress database (and spongecola’s, picture galleries, and forum). Then with the old trusty FTP client (FireFTP – firefox’s ftp client, if you’re interested of knowing..slow but it did the job), I donwloaded all the Wordress files.

Time for Restorations

Next, I uploaded WP files to 000Webhost! (God forbid that 000Webhost will close down and take all my Pinoybanda files!!!). I then created a new database and imported the pinoybanda database… It went smoothly.. thanks for small favors!

Next thing I did was edited teh wp-config.php files to reflect the new database name, user and password. Of course it would be different.

DNS and Registrars

All those things that was done above (backup and restoration) was just a preparation… We’ll it was the transfer but the domain transfer from one registrar and DNS is another one.

Like I mention, I availed the free 1 year domain from Godaddy in the .com transfer promo… (darn, I even bought the elizarpalad.com in the process!) Lol!

Availed the $7.00 domain with 1 year promo (I’m a sucker in promos) and extended my domain for another year. So for those waiting for it to be available, Pinoybanda will expire by 2010!

Anyway, I initiated the domain transfer from GoDaddy’s control panel. They emailed me the authorization code to begin the transfer. They then asked the authorization code from my other Registrar, marvinsweb, where pinoybanda was originally registered.

I emailed them and asked for the Authorization code. They email it back to me (after paying a reasonable amount – which for the original pinoybanda.com domain, which was apparently given to me free with the Silver package).

The transfer was initiated and started at GoDaddy, but another step was needed for marvinsweb. They need to release the domain.

Emailed them again and they promptly replied back.

When the tranfer was completed, I then change the DNS entry for pinoybanda from marvinsweb to 000webhost.

And few hours later (the next morning actually) pinoy banda was up using a different webhost and DNS!

All was good.. if there was any downtime, I didn’t noticed it.. I was asleep! LOL… and i did apologized to my handful of readers and subscribers.

Hope this article/overview helped someone out there! And if I keep on having such savings, I can stay in some cheap hotels! hayup!

cheers!