I’m not going to walk you through signing up for NearlyFreeSpeech.net, I’m pretty sure you can do that on your own; it’s not difficult at all. Actually, I will; Go to NearlyFreeSpeech.net, click “Sign Up Now” and follow their 5 simple steps. The most complicated part of the whole process is pumping some money into your account, but I’m sure if you’ve been on the internet a while you can use Paypal well enough to do that. Personally, I put $2.50 into my account, after fees it came out to be 2.33, which seems like more than enough for quite a while.
So, let’s get down to the complicated part of it: actually moving a blog. For my example, I’m moving www.theothermmo.com, a blog that I own, and am currently moving. This is the exact process, and I did it exactly this way.
You’re going to start by logging in. If you’re at the main NearlyFreeSpeech.net home page, you’ll click member login in the top left. What you want is the sites tab, that’s where we’re going to set up our blog. Over to the right, after clicking on sites, is a link to “Create a New Site,” that’s what you want. First they want a short name; if you’ve got an acronym for your site, use that, if not, use the full thing. The next screen asks for another name, that’s where you put in your domain name, so I put in www.theothermmo.com. Now, you’ve got a choice. The first is setting up DNS and email, but they’re going to charge you $0.02 a day for email. I personally would do the second one, just DNS, but it’s up to you. You should know that their email system won’t be like what you had on CPanel, so it might not be the best idea to play with it until you get more used to their system.
I’ll assume you did the second one, like I did. They’ll be two continue buttons to press, and then you’re all done. You’ve got a couple other things you need to set up for a blog. The most important is a MySQL database; most blogs won’t run without one. Unfortunately, that’s going to probably be the most costly part of your blog, a whole $0.30 a month. Good thing you can use the same process (what holds the databases, and what they charge for) for many different databases, so you’ll only be paying that $0.30, no matter how many blogs you’re running.
Let’s head over to the MySQL tab, that’s where you’ll be setting it up at. Just like setting up a site, you’ll click on “Create a new MySQL Process.” From there, you’ll be asked for a name for it. Pick something simple, you’ll be using it on all your blogs, so you’ll have to remember it. Then on the dropdown, click your account. There should only be one, so hit that one, it’s where you should have your money. Click continue, and you’re all set up. We’ve just got to add the database and user, so click on the name of the database from the list. Then, over to the right will be a link to “Open PHPMyAdmin,” that’s what you want. Type in your username and password, and hit continue twice. Click on privileges, then add new user. Type in a username (I’d suggest the short name you used), click generate and copy and paste the password (make sure to save the password). Change the radio button to the second option: “Create database with same name and grant all privileges.” Hit go, and you’ve got your database set up.
Before you do anything else, we’ll need a copy of your old site, you’re going to want to save all that work, right? The first part is to go download your MySQL Database. It will be different from host to host, but generally you’ll be looking for phpMyAdmin, however you get to it. Once you do, there should be a link on the first page to export. On the export page, all you need to do is hit the “Save as File” checkbox, and you’re good, hit ok. You’ve now got your databased saved nicely, so fire up your favorite FTP client and go download all the files. Again, this is going to differ between hosts, just make sure you get all the files.
Now that you’ve got your site set up, and your database set up, it’s time for the hard part. The first thing you’ll want is to point your name to the new hosts, so this may not work the same for everyone. I used GoDaddy to register www.theothermmo.com originally, so I have to use their system to point the name at the new domain. It will be different for every host, but you’re looking for a “Domain Control Panel” of some sort. For GoDaddy, you get to that by logging in, clicking Domains>My Domains, and clicking on the link for the domain you’re transferring. From there, you want to change the name server, so click on the name server button (or however you do it with your hosts). To find out what to change the Name Servers to, head back over to NearlyFreeSpeech.net, and go to your control panel. Click on the Domains tab, and click manage under DNS for your site. The first thing that comes up should be Name Servers, so copy and paste those into the box your old host has for you. It’s worth considering simply adding the new Name Servers, and not getting rid of the old ones just yet, so your site will stay up while you’re making the change. Of course, if you’re lazy like me, the few minutes of downtime won’t matter that much to you.
Everything is set up and pointing at your new host, you’ve got to install the blog now. This is probably something you’ve never done before; you’re going to be installing the blog by subversion. It’s a little easier, but it’s very different. First you’ll need what’s called a SSH client, I like PuTTY. Download it, and load it up. You’ll see a lot of boxes, most of which you won’t need. The important one is the host name, so head over to NearlyFreeSpeech.net’s member area again, we’ll need that. Go to sites again, and click on your site name. The first box there should have FTP info, SSH info, and your login info for both. Copy and paste the SSH info into PuTTY and hit open. You’ll be prompted for credentials, the username is what it says on that site page, the password is the password you log into NFS.N with. Now you’ve got an even more confusing box. You’re going to type “cd ..” which should bring up “me@XXXXX /home/” type “cd public” which will then put you at /home/public/, which is where you want to be.
Then:
Type the following commands, replacing “2.3.3″ with the version number of your blog:
$ svn checkout http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.3/ .
$ cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
$ nano -w wp-config.php
Edit the the following lines in the configuration file with the appropriate values:
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);
Replace localhost with the name of your process, e.g., yourprocess.db
Go to http://yourdomain.com/yourfolder/wp-admin/install.php
You’ve now got a blank blog installed. Go back to phpMyAdmin (its under MySQL on your members login). Pull up your database on the right, and it should give you a list of all the tables. On the dropdown beside it click drop, and hit go. Click ok (make sure to do this, I always forget). Then click import, and browse to the table that you downloaded from your old host. As a note, if your database is not named the same thing as the old one, you will have problems. Before importing it, open the file in Notepad (or an equivalent), and use the replace function to replace the old database name with the new one. You may also have to delete the “Create…” line in the file, depending on how it was saved.
You now have all your blog posts put back, so load up your FTP client again, and upload the wp-content folder to the /public folder of your site. This adds your themes and plugins back to the site. You may have to re-install the plugins depending on how they were installed.
And you’re finished. Yes, it took a little while, but it was worth it. You’re getting a much better deal for your hosting, around $0.35 a month, plus bandwidth (which will doubtfully exceed $1.00).
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