I've wanted to switch this blog across from the current Windows hosting solution to my Linux hosting account for a while now. I thought this was going to be a nightmare but it went really smooth (i think) and took less than an hour. For anyone look to do the same here's what I did:

1. Backed up all my wordpress files currently saved on my windows hosting account. To do this I just FTP'd the entire root folder that included all of the wp-content themes and plugins as well as any image and resource files that I linked to.

2. Backed up the database stored on my windows server. To do this I followed the Wordpress Codex doc on Backing up your database. Really easy to follow. I downloaded the .sql file to my hard disc.

3. Switched my website hosting from Windows (IIS) server to Apache (Website) from within the control panel that links to both my Windows and Linux hosting packages. The switch took about 5 minutes. This left with with a blank webspace on my linux server.

4. Uploaded the latest version of Wordpress (2.9.2) to my linux web space.

5. Set up a new database on the linux server.

6. Edited wp-config.php in the root of my Wordpress installation to point to the new database settings and also uploaded a .htaccess file to the root of my wordpress installation.

7. Used the Famous 5 minute install from Wordpress to install Wordpress on my Linux webspace. I then had a blank installation of Wordpress with the default Kubrick theme.

8. I uploaded all the wp-content files (themes, plugins etc.) from step one into the new installation.

9. I then imported the original database that I downloaded in step 2 using the restoring your database guide from Wordpress Codex. I was slightly confused as to how this would work before I done it as I did not keep the same name and settings for the new database on the linux server. This didn't cause any problems though and it simply imports data into the new database from the old one.

That was it. Simple and a hundred times more painless than I thought. As far as I can see everything is working perfectly. I don't know if it will have any effect on rankings in Google but I wouldn't think so. All in all I would say the site was only down for about 10 to 15 minutes so I'd be a lot more confident about doing this next time. Hopefully I won't have to do it again though as my reason for switching is that my Windows hosting solution is due shortly and I am not going to renew it as it's easier to have everything stored on Linux.

That's all for now...

Update : 6th of April 2010 : I had said that the switch was seemless but I did notice a problem with the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files associated with the all in one Seo plugin for Wordpress. Any new posts such as this one were not being written to the sitemap files. I corrected this by CHMODing the files to make them writeable.

Tags: Linux Hosting, Wordpress database backup

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 1:00 am and is filed under Blogging, Wordpress, plugin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.