Moving Wordpress servers with Yellowpark
January 23, 2008
Wordpress offers you two ways to run a blog - they host it on wordpress.com or you self host. I’ve self hosted for over two years because it gives me the widest possible range of options for plug-ins (additional pieces of functionality) and design. Until yesterday it was hosted at Opensourcehost.com who specialise in hosting open source applications - like Wordpress.
Unfortunately, Opensourcehost’s support deteriorated in recent months and over the course of several weeks I experienced a string of unwelcome site outages. Despite telling them each time an incident arose, Opensourcehost.com support denied there was any problem, despite I could see error logs showing very clearly what was happening. Last weekend was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back when I wanted someone to see a specific page and the site was down - again.
Enter stage left Chris Dalby of Yellowpark. He’s a top person who offers hosting (among other managed services) and hosts my Dinglebum site. It’s a low traffic affair but it just works. Chris has excellent references from James Governor and having tasted Chris’s service it was a no brainer to get him to help me move the site.
Two years and some 2,500 posts later, there’s a fair chunk of data to schlepp from one server to another - 250MB in total. And it has to be done right. The Wordpress backup database tools are fine but as we found, they are not quite what’s required to do a proper export/import. Here you really need the Wordpress phpMyAdmin plugin. There’s a useful tutorial for geeks that explains the procedure. And here’s a guide for doing any form of upgrade to a Wordpress site. Rule no: 1 - backup everything. Which is what Chris did.
Chris then hosted the site at a temporary location while we tested to ensure that everything is working as expected. That meant re-activating a set of plug-ins and then running a visual comparison of the ‘new’ site against the existing. It also meant running a post to ensure it ended up in the right place. Finally, I ran some common functions like using the dashboard, playing with plug-in settings and checking the spam filter to ensure everything had carried over correctly.
The final job required changing the nameservers. Think of a nameserver as the phone book where your domain name (in this case accmanpro.com) is translated into an IP address (in the format 255.255.255.0) located at the hosting provider. Nameserver changes take time to populate, usually 24-48 hours so we decided to leave everything in ‘temporary’ mode until the nameserver providers had done their stuff and just to be 100% sure that everything performed as expected.
I didn’t want to do much of this work as I did not want to run the risk of ending up with database problems that I could not handle. I handed the whole problem over to Chris, granting him admin rights to get the job done. Chris took the problem and made it a non event. That’s what I wanted.
We had a few hiccups along the way, largely because of the database problem but Chris took it all in his stride even when I was staring at a screen of - well - not a lot and wondering what was going on.
Changing service providers can be as traumatic as changing banks and the only way to ensure it’s handled properly is to hand the process over to a professional. Yes, I’m paying Chris for the service he provided. It’s not a huge amount but worth every penny in peace of mind. And as an extra bonues, the site now runs at lightning speed.
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Couldn’t agree more Dennis.
We recently commissioned Yellowpark design and host our http://www.lcslimited.co.uk website as well as my wordpress blog at http://www.lcslimited.co.uk/dcampbell and got nothing less than a top notch service from Chris.
Quick, easy and stylish - and that’s just Chris (hoho). But seriously what more do you need?
As you say, job done.
Glad to hear you are finding the transition nearly painless. Nice tips / links for more informaion on the plug-in’s and options available.
Having moved my blog content…I can tell you one mistake and you will spend A LOT of time kicking yourself.
Thanks Dennis!
Quack