[support] Need To Know How To Move Drupal To Another Hosting Company

[Larry Garfield]

Hi, Rob.  Here's what I do when moving a 4.6 instal from a devel server to
live, so it should be the same process.

First, ensure your new host will work with Drupal in the first place. :-) 
Assuming it does, create a database and database user on the new host, but
do NOT put anything in it yet.

Go to your current site and, in admin/settings, disable Clean URLs and the
Page Cache.

Take a database dump of your current database.  If you're on the command
line, mysqldump will do this for you.  If your host offers phpMyAdmin,
that works, too, or they may have some other backup process.  As long as
you get a .sql file out of it at the end, either way will work.

Load the database dump into the new database you just created.  Again, the
exact process varies with the web host, but the command is the same as if
you were following the install instructions, just with a different file. 
After it's loaded, clear the cache table.  The SQL command would be
"DELETE FROM cache;" (no quotes, of course).

Now, copy all of the files in your Drupal install from your old host to
the new host, verbatim.  Once that's done, check the permissions on the
files/ directory (and its contents) to make sure they're set correctly.

Now edit your settings.php file on the new server.  Again, it's just like
it were a new install.

You should now be able to log into your new Drupal install and re-enable
Clean URLs and the page cache.  (Those can sometimes cause weirdness if
the new server isn't configured correctly, so it's safer to disable them
for the move.)

Bear in mind that if you're also mving the domain name to a new host,
there will be a delay in getting the domain to point to the new server. 
The details there vary depending on your web hosts.

Hope that helps.  Cheers.

--Larry Garfield

On Wed, December 21, 2005 5:13 pm, Rob said:
> I am moving several sites to another hosting company. I wanted to ask if
> someone could explain how I should go about moving my existing Drupal site
> files so I will not lose archives etc.The simplest way possible is what I
> need to do since I only know how to use Drupal but am not familiar with
> some
> of the technical things about servers.
>
> Rob
> --
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