On Sat, 2011-10-08 at 08:49 -0400, James Rome wrote:
I need to move my sites to a new host. What is the procedure for doing this, especially the backup and restore of the database? Does the hosting-specific information reside inside the database? If so, how do I change them? The page URLs will not be changed.
If you have SSH access:
mysqldump -u username -p yourdatabase > yourdatabase.sql
To restore on the new server, you need to create the database first:
mysqladmin -u username -p create yourdatabase
Then:
mysql -u username -p
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER ON yourdatabase.* TO 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
To import the database:
mysql -u username -p yourdatabase < yourdatabase.sql
... Copy the Drupal files into the html directory, make sure that your database & $base_url settings in /sites/default/settings.php match up, and you're good to go.
If you don't have SSH, I'm sure you can figure out how to do the equivalent with phpmyadmin.
If you're not working in a sub-directory (E.g. www.sitename.com/yoursite), then the hosting specific data should all be based on relative paths (i.e. "/sites/default/files" and shouldn't need any changes. But do check out for the $base_url if you are changing domain names.
HTH