Recently I moved to a new host (WiredTree). WiredTree will migrate your site for you, but I wanted to do it myself. The following are lessons learn from the move including understanding vldP license requirements.
NEW HOST
When you sign up for a new host, they will probably send you a Welcome Email with passwords and instructions. One of the first things you will want to do before getting started with the steps below is pointing your URLs from your old host to your new host. It is something that most can do on their own, but if not, contact your host. Here is the basic steps.
1. Log in to your old host cpanel
2. There should be an area to manage your domains. In my case, there is a tab called Name Servers.
3. For each domain I own (I have 9) I had to change the Name Server from my old host to my new host. Normally the new host's Welcome email will tell you what the Name Servers are called. You will type in the Name Servers of your new host for each domain you own in your old host's domain manger. How exactly you accomplish this on your host may be different than mine, but usually it is pretty obvious where you change the Name Servers.
4. Propagation is the process of your domain transferring from your old host to your new host. This can take anywhere from a few hours to 24 hours. If you want to check out how things are going, here is link you can use to check your propagating process - http://www.whatsmydns.net/
What you are looking for, is the new IP address of your new host. If you check and see the IP address of your old host, than your domain is still pointing to your old server. Once you see your new host IP address, than you know your domain is pointing to your new server.
5. You can also check to see if your site is propagating for your ISP by using windows ping or lookup command.
-- In windows click Run
-- Type cmd
-- Next type ping yourdomain.com or type nslookup yourdomain.com
If you see your site propagating by using the link in step 4 above, but hours later your ISP is still showing your old host's ISP, recommend you turn off your computer, unplug your modem and any network hub you are using to network, to clear your ISP cache. I would leave the computer off and modem/network turned off for at least 10 minutes before turning it on and plugging things back in.
6. You may also have to create what they call a DNS Zone for each domain on your new host. Again, instructions should of been provided by your new host. If not, contact them.
When you decide to proceed with the following steps depends on rather you want to wait until your domain name has propagated to your new server or you can jump right in if you have adequate instructions from your hosts on how to access your new and old hosts cpanels, how to ftp, etc. I jumped right in. Nothing says you have to do the following in the order listed.
MOVING FILES
Moving files is not that difficult with one possible exception and that is your media folder. Before I get into the steps, let me say I'm using vldP version 2.5.3. I believe starting with 2.5.5, the file structure of the media (audio, images, video) folder changed and ftp may not be an issue. With 2.5.3 and prior, all media was saved under one folder called upload. My upload folder had tons of files. This caused ftp issues when I would copy files from my host to my local drive. If you use a ftp programs (I use several but FileZilla at http://filezilla-project.org/ is one of the best and it is free) to copy a large media folder from your host to your local drive, I can guarantee you that you will not move all your media with a ftp program. The following steps is what I recommend for moving files.
1. On your old host, copy (ftp) all your vldP files from your sever to your local drive. As far as the media folder (read above paragraph), if you do not have that much media, there should be no issue copying the folder to your local drive. If your media folder has a lot of files there may be an issue (later I will recommend how to solve).
2. On your new host, recommend uploading your vldP files to the same file structure you used on your old host. If you had vldP installed in the root of the old host, upload to the root of the new host. If you had vldP installed in a folder at your old host, create a folder with the same name on your new host and upload to it.
3. Config.php. Make sure you do not delete or change the config.php that you copied from your old host. Later you may have to make changes, but for now, just make sure you don't accidently delete it.
4. Media Folder. Ok, You read everything I said above about media folder. Lets assume you are having problems with copying your media folder to your local drive by ftp. Again you won't get any ftp errors, but after you upload your media folder to your new host, you discover images are missing. There is a good chance ftp didn't copy all your media files to your local drive. Here is what I did:
-- In my old host CPANEL, I would use the backup command
-- There are several ways to backup. The important thing is to use the backup that will copy all files, including your media folder, to your local drive. By using the backup command, you will ensure that all media files have been downloaded to your local drive. In my hosts cpanel, I use the Home Directory backup (see image below). I could of used the Full Backup, but that is overkill - backs up all my files plus all cpanel files. If you are not sure, ask your old host which backup command to use to back up all your files. Also, if you have a lot of files, you may want to do the back up when you are not using your computer -- I do it before going to bed and leave it backup during the night.
Now that I have all of the media files on my local drive, I can use my ftp program to upload my media files.
NOTE: When uploading to a new host, I usually have no issues with ftp. The only time I have ftp issues is when I try to download (copy) the content of the media folder to my local drive when the media folder is large. That is why I use my cpanel backup command to copy my files to my local drive and then use ftp to upload my media folder to my new host.
5. Permissions. Now that you have all your files, including media files, on your new host, it is time to check your permissions. Besides my vldP files, I also made sure my ioncube folder, my htaccess and php.ini files were uploaded to my new host. The permissions you check are the same ones you checked when you installed vldP. Installation/Permission Instructions
TO ALL GURU'S WHO WILL MENTION SSH -- I agree, if you have SSH use it, but if not or you don't know what SSH is, than don't bother with it. My old host did not have SSH capability or they did not give me permission to use it.
CREATING DATABASE AND USER ON NEW HOST
1. I was lucky and was able to create the same database and username that I used on my old host to my new host including the same prefix. Many of you may be able to create the same name, but your new host's prefix may be different. It isn't a big deal if you can't create the same name as your old host, we just got to remember to change the config.php file to reflect the new name. I will discuss config.php later.
2. Exporting. We need to export the database from the old host. We are going to use phpmyadmin to export to our local drive.
The image below should help you set the settings to export your database. I highlited in green the important settings.
-- After you have selected the database (see above image), select the Export tab.
-- Make sure to click"select all" to select all tables and check the sql format to export
-- Under Structure - be sure to select the settings you see in the image highlited in green
-- Under Data - be sure to select the settings you see in the image highlited in green
-- Be sure you have the "Save as file" selected with a check mark and "gzipped" as your format
-- When everything is set, click the Go button to export the database to your local drive.
3. Importing. Ok, now that we have exported the database from our old host to our local drive, it is time to import the old database to the new database we created in step 1 above on our new host.
CONFIG.PHP
Your config.php contains your configuration for your site. It is usually under the includes folder. In the above steps, I talked about keeping the same file structure and names from your old host on your new host, but if things did not quite work out, good chance you will need to make some changes to your config.php. Before making those changes, be sure to backup the old one and keep it in a safe place. Once you know you have a working config.php for your site, you will want to make another copy of that working copy and keep in safe place.
After you made your changes and uploaded the config.php to your new host, I would double check the config.php permission to be sure it is correrct.
READY, SET, GO
Ok we now cross our fingers, and type in the URL for our site. If all went well, we say yea, if not, we say CACHE. If you did everything correctly but something went wrong, the first I thing I would do is clear cache. Go to your includes/cache folder on your new host and clear it out and try again.
VLDP LICENSE
Even though you have a valid license, you may still see an error saying your license is not valid. I'm still not sure I have this whole licensing thing down pat. It took me a few tries to get licensing straight, but once I did, I was up and running. Here is the scoop.
You will have to log in to your vldP Client area and click the My Product link. There you should see a list of your license. Click the license you are using for the vldP you uploaded to your new host. The license number in your vldP Product area should match the license number in your config.php. You can use only one license per vldP installed. There are some exceptions I will talk about later.
In the above screen, you click the "Reissue License" button. After you click it, you must clear the includes/cache folder for the vldP you uploaded to the new host.
For whatever reason, it took me a few tries to get things straight. I was moving 3 vldP sites to the new host and it could be that I was just tired and not paying attention. But it did take me several tries to get my licenses matched up with the right vldP config file for each copy I owned. If you do have problems, check your config.php file and make sure the license you are "Reissuing" matches. If you have the right license number in your config.php for the license you are trying to reissue, all I can say is to try again by pushing the "Reissue License" button, clear the includes/cache again and keep trying until it works out. Like I said, it took me several tries.
Obviously if you tried more times than you can count and still are not getting it to work, it is time to put in a help ticket at vldP help desk.
VLDP LICENSE EXCEPTIONS
I asked vlad about using the same license more than once for testing and he said you could as long you installed the test copy of vldP in a folder called test. Here is how it works.
If I have vldP installed under my root at asian-wife.net, I could create a folder under the root called test, install vldP in the test folder and use the same license I used for asian-wife.net for the vldP I installed in the test folder.
Another example: Lets say I have my main vldP installed in a folder called dating. The path to my main vldP is root/dating/. In this case, if I want to install a test copy than I would have to install the test folder under the dating folder. The path for my test folder would be root/dating/test.
TESTING
Ok, you have vldP installed on your new host. There are no cache or license problems and things seem to be running ok or are they?? It is time to test. I'm not big into testing, for that matter I hate it, but it is a necessary evil.
A good example is my recent experience. I had my sites running on my new host and all seem to be working well. I created a test member (by the way, if you have a folder named test, do not create a member in vldP called test). I called my test member "asiantest", logged in and went to create a blog as asiantest and I got a fatal error message -- oh my!
This is why you have the debug=1 in your config.php file when testing. If it was set as debug=0 (default setting) and I did the blog test, I would of got a blank screen with no error message. But with debug=1 set in my config.php, I got a error message. I copied the error message and sent it to my host. They knew what the problem was and fixed it. Can you imagine if I said to my host "I get a blank screen when I create a blog". They probably would of scratched their head and told me to contact vlad which in turn vlad would of told me to change my debug to debug=1 and tell him what the error said.
So lesson learn is if you have a problem and not sure what it is, try changing your debug in your config.php file to debug=1 to see if you get an error message to send to the experts so they can figure out what is wrong. Don't forget to change your debug back to 0 when you are done testing.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
All my sites are now on my new host and things are up and running. There were some minor tweaking but other than that, things seem to be as they should. Don't forget about your emails. If you changed hosts and got new emails addresses, you may have to update your email settings in your vldP Control Panel.
Good Luck.
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