Migrating to Hudson Valley Host

I just finished migrating my website over to the folks at Hudson Valley Host. For $5, I get a pretty frikin good deal: 100GBs, 3GBs RAM, and even DDOS protection: link to the deals Considering that I also moved from Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit to Ubuntu 15.04 64 bit while doing this migration, everything went better than expected.

Ok back to the notes about migrating a WordPress website:

Checklist:

• a copy of your mysql database
  • mysqldump -u username -p databasename > backup.sql
• a copy of your entire website directory
• some blue moon, or other similarly delicious alcoholi beverage

Then:

• setup LAMP
• import your mysql database
  • mysql -u username -p newdatabasename < backup.sql
• upload the website directory to your new VPS
• copy over your /etc/apache2 and /etc/php5 files
• change DNS to point to your new IP
• press refresh and….

Bam! Your website is probably not loading. So here are some key pointers for troubleshooting broken links/not loading website:

• a2enmod rewrite (make sure you load the rewrite engine)
• a2enmod suexec
• check the folder and file permissions
• make sure your database name and user passwords are correct
• delete the .htaccess and let wordpress regenerate it

Overall, migrating a wordpress website isn’t too bad.