Due to a) holidays, b) four Bank holidays, and c) my old web hosting deal expiring next week, I was left with two-and-a-half working days to transfer three WordPress sites onto Unlimited Web Hosting..
Having done this sort of thing in the past (chronicled on this very blog), I thought it’d be a breeze. Backup all files via FTP, dump the databases, and then reload at the other end. Wrong.
Glitch #1. Can’t get the data out of jabweb. My databases are humungous, and timeout their export function. Tried everything, including wp-db-backup. (5 hours!)
Eventually got them to “fix” export.php.
Glitch #2. Can’t import the database files at Unlimited. Format error. Damn.
So I got on to Unlimited Support. (always excellent), and they said, “we’ll do it for you”. So they did.
(Apparently one of my database files is “massive”.)
Obviously, the new sites were not linked-to by DNS yet, so I edited my hosts file
I FTP’d the files over to all three sites.
Datafeedr had lost all data on all three sites. Bizarre. Manually re-created the ad groups. (Stored in wp-options as one record, by the way..)
One site appeared to have “lost” it’s background. Seems to be a problem with Opera – it’s fine on Chrome.
But one site had the dreaded “internal server 500 error”.
Quick e-mail to Unlimited again, and the problem is traced to the .htaccess file.
Deleted it, and replaced it with a blank, then updated wordpress permalinks, and it’s up.
Swapped all DNS to Unlimited.
Now, it’ll take a WHILE for the DNS servers to calm down, but it doesn’t matter as the OLD version is still a functioning website. To my users, it’s seamless..
Done. š
