I have been reading up on how to move WordPress blog to a new web hosting provider and finally did it last night.

After I have rebuild my blog I decided that besides affiliate marketing, I also want to venture into CPA marketing.. To prepare for that I acquire another domain (http://www.nichecontentonline.com) and planned to use it as my blogging platform for several niches. This way my additional expenses will be just the new domain only as I can add-on this domain to my existing web hosting services. After I have set up everything and started blogging for one of the niche I was still getting rejected by CPA networks. The main reason being that the IP where my blog originated from falls into those that are blacklisted by third party source DNSStuffs.com hence doesn’t meet the compliance standards of most CPA network.

To get around this restriction I decided to sign up for another web hosting service with Hostgator and assigned my new domain to this web hosting service. Yes more investment but I guess it is necessary if I want to be able to get started with CPA Marketing. Given that so many Internet Marketer uses Hostgator I am hoping that the IP restriction will not be an issue anymore. Since I have to move the domain I also need to move the WordPress blog to Hostgator.

With some planning based on the information I read from the web, I started backing up all my files and the entire database of my blog through cpanel. I also put the blog into maintenance mode so that anyone accessing to my blog will be informed as such.

Since I am moving my blog I also took the opportunities to upgrade my WordPress blog to the latest version which is 2.9.2. I took the source of the latest version of WordPress and than added all the themes, plugins and modification that I made to the blog before I upload it to Hostgator.

To simplify the process I used the Backup and Restore feature in the cPanel to transfer the database. This is probably the easiest way to migrate the database instead of doing export and import through phpMyAdmin. I then modify the wp-config.php to point my new blog to this database. Since I change the folder name where I install my blog,  I have to add the following two lines into the wp-config.php file so that the site url is automatically converted for every posts.

define(‘WP_HOME’,'http://www.nichecontentonline.com/WaysOfMakingUp’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,'http://www.nichecontentonline.com/WaysOfMakingUp’);

I decided to take the easier route for this change rather than going deep into the database to change it. If you forgot these two lines, you’ll get an 404 error when you try to access to the dashboard.

I then change the DNS on my domain and waited for the propagation to completed before I can access my blog now running on Hostgator.

Now that I have moved this WordPress blog, I will need to manually edit the links and WordPress configurations to reflect it new location. Links in comments and posts would also need editing, as they will need to point to the new URL of the WordPress blog. There are still some broken links on the main page but I am fixing those as I find them. I still need to change the links on my inbound posts on another blogs to ensure that the search engine can find this blog.

Overall I am pretty happy with this move and I have learned a lot more about the various components of a WordPress blog as well as understand the database structure of a WordPress blog better.