WatkissOnline now on Hosted web space - Wordpress Successfully Migrated

22 January 2007

Following the success I've had with www.penguintutor.com and www.firstaidquiz.com, I've now moved my www.watkissonline.co.uk website as well. If you are reading this post then it's been successful.

The hosting company that I am with is Compila.com. I've found that they offer good value for money, although it is a budget service it is adequate for what I want it for. They have a special buy one year, get another free at the moment, which means that it costs little more than what I was paying to register my own domain.

I have some ideas for making some significant changes to the web site in future, but for now I just wanted to make sure I could transfer the existing site successfully. My biggest worry was that wordpress would not work after the migration, but it appears to be working fine. I had to use a different mysql database name, and username to meet the conventions on the hosted server, but after changing them in the PHP configuration file it all appears to be working OK. I also had to copy the wp-content/upload directory, which contains all files uploaded through the web interface.

I believe that moving a blog onto a different domain is harder (or at least involves specific steps that need to be done in the correct order), but moving from one server to another was quite easy.

The other thing I did was to migrate some mod_rewrite rules over from inclusion in the apache config file (in this case a file in sites-enabled, although it could have been httpd.conf), to a .htaccess file for use on the hosted web site. I have a number of redirect rules for a few different reasons.

Some old files redirected to new ones
.html files replaced with .php files
Some errors that have crept into some old links
User friendly URLs replacing complex script urls (e.g. www.watkissonline.co.uk/babysignlanguage instead of http://watkissonline.co.uk/?p=364.

The last of which is explained better in Apache mod_rewrite with Query String - redirecting wordpress pages to posts.

This meant a slight change so that they were relative rather than absolute entries, as I'd already come across with my other hosted web sites. Using mod_rewrite (RewriteRule) in .htaccess file on Apache.