I have another blog all about celebrities but unfortunately I started it long, long ago when I was much more naive about how SEO and the Internet works. The domain name is horrendous so I figured I would register a better one and transfer my site. It’s in WordPress so I figured it would be a breeze. I didn’t want to “transfer the account” within CPanel, even though both sites are on the same VPS, I just wanted to transfer the files and keep both sites live until I was completed and then I would redirect the old site to the new one.

After 5 support tickets with my host I realized I would have to do the transfer myself. I only asked for their help because of the size of the downloads. There are over 10,000 images and it would take forever to download them and re-upload to the same server. I figured it would be much easier for them to accomplish from the server side. Apparently this was too much to ask!

I accomplished it, but likely took the longest route possible! Rather than download individual files and folders, I performed a complete backup which gave me a backup of my entire site. I then uploaded this file to the root of my new domain. I used SSH access to “unzip” the file on the server, not realizing it would keep the entire structure from before.

Created Database

Next I had to get a SQL backup of the database and upload it to the new domain. I once again used SSH to restore the database into my newly created database. I thought I was done until I visited my new site and found it all screwed up. Everything in the database was pointing to my old domain! I made the mistake of trying to open the SQL database locally with Wordpad, which froze my machine eventually because it was over a 100MB text file.

I was lucky enough to find a little program called “SCR” that allows you to find/replace within a local SQL database without actually having to open it. I put the domain name in to find, and the new domain name in to replace it with and it actually completed in seconds. I once again uploaded to the new domain and restored this database.