Use at your own risk and always backup your data

The site moved to a new server today and I had to scramble a little, I thought they would just increase my disk space not put me on a new server. I was able to grab Kay’s mail, backup the WordPress database and site files before the dns propagated. Putting files back in place would be easy but I wasn’t sure about restoring the database. The main reason was they gave me a different admin login which means the database would be owned by a different user and table prefixes would change. But as always there should be a way, and there was.

I had to do something similar years ago for some reason I don’t remember so I set out to do a little searching. First stop was the Word Press page for moving a site. That led me to restoring your database from a backup and then on to something with pictures.

I followed the directions but had to add my own twist since the new database would be named different than the old one. Unfortunately that was out of my control.

Again that was due to the provider giving me a different admin login than what I had for the old server.

Since I had backups of my database, specifically a .sql backup, I opened it in a text editor (gedit) to review. I didn’t have to look hard to see anywhere I saw the old name I could replace it with the new one. After making a copy of the original, always make a copy, I did a simple Search Replace and save. Following the instructions I then “dropped” the existing database … but there was nothing it is since is was fresh from an install so no harm no foul, then imported the .sql file using phpMyAdmin. There I ran into a small problem. The .sql file had a statement in it to create a database, but in my case it already existed. Easy enough, comment out the CREATE.

/*CREATE DATABASE `<database name>` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci;
USE `<database name>`;
*/

With that out of the way import again and success !! I go to the site and all is well, nice. The internet does it again, a wealth of information at your finger tips…. and a little bit of logic.

Note: Standard changes to wp-config.php apply, if necessary. Since I dropped the database created on the new server and imported my old one my password did not change.