Steps I took for moving my Wordpress site to be hosted on Earthlink

My neighborhood's home owner's association is using Earthlink hosting.  Most of the cheap shared hosting services have some eccentricities that you may run into when trying to do anything outside the standard "1 click installer" type of actions.  Earthlink seems to be especially behind the times.

Some clues:

• Their Wordpress installer provides a very outdated version of Wordpress.

• They install Wordpress into a directory you do not have ssh or ftp access to, which makes automatic updates impossible.

• During my fiddling with user database accounts, I managed to get the web panel into a state where I was locked from doing anything to my phpmyadmin installation.

However,  both times I've used their chat support tool I've received fast and helpful replies, so the barrier for switching hosting services stayed just high enough to keep me with Earthlink (for now).

Getting to the point: here's what I did to get the latest version of Wordpress (with updated plugins and a database full of pages) migrated from a server I was running locally.

1. Use the Earthlink wordpress installer

This creates the wp-config.php and puts it into /private.  It also creates the database, which is not a big deal but it's nice.  It also probably fixes up htaccess and some other settings, which you can't edit.

You can't stop here though because you can't update your Wordpress installation, and running with an old version of Wordpress is bad for security and breaks many of the plugins that make Wordpress awesome.

2. Clean up your database dump file

You used mysqldump to get the data from your old database, right?  That's good, but you need to change the urls in the database dump file.  I was able to do this quickly using find/replace on the dump sql file.

Also, because the commands in the dump files include "lock" and "unlock" statements and Earthlink doesn't give you those permissions on your database users for some reason, you need to remove all of these commands.  I ended up just running the commands for each table one at a time, removing the "lock" and "unlock" statements for each table before executing.

3. Install phpmyadmin

For some reason I couldn't run any sql commands from the command line.  So In installed phpmyadmin, which worked fine.

One thing to look out for is that you have to associate the phpmyadmin installation with a single database when you add it.  If you delete the user associated with the database through Earthlink's console, the database is also deleted, and this breaks phpmyadmin to a point where you can't re-install, uninstall, or re-associate the phpmyadmin installation with a different database.  At that point, you have to talk to support.

4. Delete all the crap the Wordpress install placed in the /public folder

Yes, you just added it, but this is where your new Wordpress files will go.  Make sure to not delete the /phpmyadmin symlink in that directory.  You need that.

5. Copy all of files for your local Wordpress install into Earthlink's /public folder

Here "local Wordpress install" means all the files from the installation you already had running somewhere else.  FTP works fine here.


6. Copy the wp-config.php files from /private to /public

This file is pretty important.  You could fiddle around with the wp-load file to get it to fine the wp-config file in /private, but I found it simpler just to move the file.


That should be it!  It felt a little unclean, but it got the job done and I'm now running a modern copy of Wordpress that I can easily update because all of the files are in a folder I have FTP access to.