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Moving your Joomla site to a new server

Written by Marco Conti Wednesday, 14 November 2007 17:11

This is a brief "how to" on how to move your Joomla, Zen Cart website or pretty much any PHP based open source script from server to server or within your own server.

Moving sites around using Cpanel or Plesk is quite easy and there is no reason you should not be able to do it on your own. Cpanel, as in many other things is quicker and easier than Plesk, but still it's entirely possible to move your Plesk based site by following the steps below. Just adapt for the features plesk is missing and you should be fine.

Note: these steps are specific to Joomla and Cpanel/WHM. If there are enough requests I'll be happy to make changes to include Plesk and other scripts more specifically.

The first step in making any site move is to backup what you have.

Cpanel provides you with an handy "Backup" button on it's main page. While it's possible to backup the entire server that way, or even to move a site directly using WHM, I am going to stick to the simple way here as it doesn't require winded explanations and it's still quite easy.

Click on the "Backup" icon in Cpanel
There you'll see a "backup entire site, Backup file system and backup database.
Pick the backup file system first. This will download a Gzip file containing your public_html directory
Next backup all your databases by clicking on their names
Now, you should know which DB goes with which one of your Joomla installations. If you only have one, that's easy. More than one, prepare a simple spreadsheet with all the username, password, etc. To ge those, go to the corresponding "configuration.php" in Joomla's top level and read the following fields:
Once you are done, it's time to prepare the transfer.

Here your life will be a lot easier if on the new server you can have the same username and password as on the old one, at least at the beginning.

Go to Cpanel on the new server and create a new database, entering the same dbuser, dbname and dbpass as the ones you got from the configuration.php file

Now it's time to upload the file system to the server. Here, depending on your specific Cpanel type you'll have several choices:

Extract the backup from the old Cpanel locally and open the public_html directory.

Select all your files and zip them again (or gzip, doesn't matter). What we need to do is make sure that when we let Cpanel 'expand' the files on the server they do not create another directory below public_html with the name of the archive. Otherwise you'll need to then move the files over a directory

Next, we upload the compressed archive to the public_html directory using Cpanel "file Manager" feature. This will open a new window with the files. Navigate to public_html and once it's opened click on "upload file"

Once the file is uploaded, click on the filename (clicking on a directory opens the directory, clicking on the filename select the file or directory for user intervention)

On the top select "unarchive" and Cpanel will expand all the files in the server.

Now, connect through SSH or FTP and open the "configuration.php" file. If nothing has changed fine, but if your user account is different or you are placing the file in a directory structure not identical to the one you had before, you need to edit the following lines:

Now, let's go to the database area of Cpanel. Click on "New" and copy past the database and user names from the :"configuration.php file in your Joomla.

Once that's done, simply go once again to the "backup" area and click on Upload under the database line and upload your DB bacup from the old server.

If everything was done properly, your Joomla site should be working now.

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Site not coming up?

There can be a number of reasons why a site may not work after moving to another server. Lots of my students have the same problem after their first move and usually the reasons are along these lines:

The path in configuration.php is different than what it should be. Be careful to change not only the folder path but also the account name in the path (above public_html)

Database name and user name also get the account name before the name proper.
oldAccount_dbname and NewAccount_dbname are different

Often they move the DB to the new server but they do not create a new DB user or they forget to assign the DB user to the new Database.

new server permissions are differnt than old server. This is especially true if the new or old server used phpSuExec.

These are the most common oversights, but of course there could be numerous others. Just remember that if the site worked on the old server it's got to work on the new server, so methodically go through the configuration.php and make sure the DB name and user names are correct.

Marco Conti , September 07, 2009 | url