Carl Hutzler's Blog

Don’t know about the rest of you, but my blog seemed to load very slowly of late. I tried a bunch of things but could not figure it out and started to suspect my hosting company (1and1.com). Being Christmas Eve and all, I decided today would be a good time to find out.

I went with Dreamhost and signed up for their yearly plan ($10 a month…same as 1and1 business hosting). I heard they were a good provider and I was hoping that the speed issue was indeed 1and1.com and not my blog set-up itself.

My blog was hosted as a directory off of my main site (carlhutzler.com/blog). I wanted to be able to move the main site (my photo business) and the blog as close to seemlessly as possible. I was a little nervous as I had not moved a Wordpress blog before. My website was simple…just a bunch of html files, but the blog had a MySQL database with all kinds of data in it along with my configuration settings and even a little .htaccess rewrite rules for the pretty URL stuff.

I read up a little on the subject and decided to go with the steps after the break…

1a) SSH into my old hosting account and SCP every file to the new hosting account – took about an hour to complete. Make sure to grab the “.” files as well….I forgot my .htaccess file which did the pretty URL rewriting initially.

scp -r * user@spillane.dreamhost.com:carlhutzler.com

- Note: My new hosting account was online in seconds…not the usual several hours 1and1 takes…yeah!
- Note: I was able to CHOOSE my own FTP/SSH account name as opposed to the strange u1234567-Carl account 1and1 makes you use which I always forget…yeah!

1b) Also create a backup of the wordpress blog databases. I use a plugin to do it from within Wordpress.
This saves a file to my desktop called db154769176_wp_20081223.sql.gz (you may require the wordpress plugin called Wordpress Database Backup or you can use your MySQL PHP Admin interface or the SSH command line)

Note: Wordpress has a simple IMPORT/EXPORT function built into the system under TOOLS. I tried this and it does export/import all posts, comments, etc. But the issue is that it does not import your settings and this is important for the look and feel of your blog including plugin settings, user accounts, theme settings, and much more. Unless you just want the data, this is a poor option.

2) Create a new MySQL database on the new hosting company.
Did not name it the same as the old one or even the same user/password settings.

3) Install a fresh Wordpress 2.7 install (same version as I was running at the old provider).
Set-up the system as if it was brand new by configuring the wp-config.php with all my database login info and then going to the wordpress URL and letting it set-up all the tables, etc. Once this was complete, I had a new, empty blog with a single post “Hello World”.

4) FTP the db154769176_wp_20081223_097.sql.gz wordpress backup file to the new dreamhost site up at the root level.
SSH into dreamhost and gunzip that file. Then issue this command to import the data I backed-up at the beginning:

mysql -h hostname -u username -p dbasename < db154769176_wp_20081223.sql

At this point, my blog was working just fine! That was pretty easy.

So is it faster? My experience so far says YES!