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.