I have been working on moving my website to a new host over the last couple days, so here are a few of the things that “got me” along the way. I created an account with hostmonster.com to take advantage of “unlimited” drive space as well as the ability to ssh into my web server. So far the service seems great and the server is much faster than my free server at GoDaddy. Creating the account and getting WordPress installed was as easy as clicking next a few times and creating an account. I ran into a little trouble trying to get my posts from one server to the next, but was finally able to get it. I first tried to do an export from within WordPress, but the “download XML” button would only display the XML on a new page and would not download it. Firefox/IE/Chrome didn’t like something about the page so I could not get the whole thing that way.
I ended up getting it copied over by using phpmyadmin on both sides to export the DB and then import it on the new host. After doing the import, I couldn’t even load the admin page anymore due to bad links in the configuration. Again, I was able to use phpMyAdmin to go through the tables and update any links that referenced either the old URL or the path that was used on the old host. Once I had all of those updated, I was able to get to the admin page, change my theme to the default and then see my blog. I had to change the theme because I hadn’t installed any themes yet on the new host so there were a lot of missing files.
My next effort was to get my photo gallery going and HostMonster had scripts to install Gallery, Coppermine and Zenphoto. I installed Gallery and Coppermine just to look around, but I didn’t like the way I would have to manage my pictures with them, so I uninstalled each of them and went with Zenphoto. Zenphoto allows me to simply upload my pictures in their already sorted folders an the application makes albums based on folder structure. It also takes care of creating thumbnails for all of the pictures. Installing Zenphoto caused me a bit of a headache because after installing it I was never able to log in. On the “simplescripts” installation page, HostMonster gives you the option to define an administrative username and password. I used the same username I was using on my old installation but could not log in. I first thought that the installation was just bad, so I unistalled and reinstalled exactly the same way with the same results. The next time, I unistalled and then re-installed without defining my own user account. This way it would generate an account for me with the default ‘admin’ user and a randomly generated password. This worked, and then I was able to log in and create my own account. Apparently you cannot define a specific username during installation of Zenphoto on HostMonster…not sure how this would work with any other host.
At the moment, I am working to get my pictures uploaded to the site. I just tried copying a few using rsync, but that is proving to be quite slow for the initial feed. I have found some instructions to use tar and pipe it to ssh in order to get better compression for the initial transfer so I may try that method later. I think the command I will need is going to be this:
tar -czf – /some/file | ssh host.name tar -xzf – -C /destination
Taken from this site: http://www.crucialp.com/resources/tutorials/server-administration/how-to-copy-files-across-a-network-internet-in-unix-linux-redhat-debian-freebsd-scp-tar-rsync-secure-network-copy.php