Moving a WordPress Website to a New Webhost

GadgetReactor had a server outage on 26 Sep 12 with our previous webhost. If you were affected, we are very sorry! We have since migrated to another host, which should improve loading times too. 000webhost offers free web hosting and while they have been great as a free host, they do have a 20% CPU limit and hitting the limit unknowingly was a bummer. It would be good to keep it as a backup server though.

For migrating of a wordpress site to a new host

• Step 1: Through CPanel and myPHPAdmin on my earlier webhost, I exported my database to a file on my computer. I saved it as an uncompressed .SQL file. Compression with gzip led to errors for me. So be warned.
• Step 2: If database and URL remains the same, you can move by just copying your files through FTP.
• Step 3: Setup a database on the new webhost with preferably the same user and database name.
• Step 4: If database name or user changes, edit wp-config.php to have the correct values. You would have to check and update the server address here as well.
• Step 5: Try out your website!

I was lucky. Even though web access to GadgetReactor.com was down, I could still reach my database and still had FTP access as well. So downtime was minimised to copying out the files and transferring of the nameservers to a new host. Otherwise, I had to wait until 000webhost was willing to lift the restrictions, and I wonder how long that would actually take. This episode taught me the very important lesson of backing up the precious content that we had put together over the last few months. I was thinking about it but procrastination is truly the devil. There are a couple of free WordPress plugins available but reviews generally seem average with complains on loading of server performance, etc.

For now, I am setting a bi-weekly calendar to manually backup my website contents and database through FTP. For the posts in between, I am relying on downloading my news feed through RSS automatically with IFTTT. Any suggestions on an automatic backup for WordPress?