Moving from Dreamhost to Lunarpages

January 2, 2009 12:44 PM

I Want to move my Wordpress blog from Dreamhost to Lunarpages. Where do I start?

Hi all,

I want to move my sites (all Wordpress blogs) from Dreamhost to Lunarpages. Dreamhost is a nice bunch of guys and all, but all the downtime combined would have enabled me to grow a significant beard, if I wanted one. Which I don't, but that's beside the point.

The site I currently host at Lunarpages has had no downtime that I'm aware of and they are really responsive and professional. Therefore I now want to bring all my sites there.

Please help me. These are my requirements:

- I'm not extremely technical (self taught and have no clue about databases etc) and am looking for a step by step approach for dummies.

- If possible I would like to have no or very limited downtime of my sites.

- Additionaly, I would like to have some advice on which plan I should take with Lunarpages. One of my sites has appr. 4k to 7k visitors per day, the rest is very limited.


Thank you so much for your kind help!

posted by IZ to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You're right about Dreamhost downtime. I once gave up on installing Wordpress on Lunarpages, though, because if I remember right, you can't get command line access, for security reasons?
posted by johngoren at 12:51 PM on January 2

unless you're going to pay $$$$$$$, you are going to have downtime. "NO downtime" doesn't exist. people talk about '5 nines' (99.999%) as the ultimate barometer of uptime for websites, and that's for massive enterprise sites.

it happens. and it's going to happen if you are doing shared hosting with anyone, Dreamhost or Lunarpages or anyone of that ilk.

I almost fled Dreamhost during The Great Billing Fiasco of 2008, and then decided it wasn't worth the hassle and I wasn't sure that anyone was any better. I looked at Lunarpages and decided against them because they seemed wayyyyy too low budget for me.

That said I will probably flee Dreamhost at the next significant outage. I've just been with them for 5 years and

That said, doesn't Lunarpages move your sites for you? Isn't that part of the attraction?

That said, I googled "Move Wordpress site" and came up with dozens of documents.

this is probalby chatfilter, delete if needed.
posted by micawber at 1:25 PM on January 2

IZ: If possible I would like to have no or very limited downtime of my sites.

Do you mean you would like your provider to have no downtime, or do you mean that you would like limited downtime while moving your sites?

If LP gives you an IP to use, then I'd probably get everything moved into your new site via that IP using CPanel, ftp, or what-have-you. Then, have your DNS updated to point to the new IP. After a day or so most people's DNS servers should've updated to the Lunarpages address, then you can cancel your old service.
posted by britain at 1:56 PM on January 2

I've moved Wordpress blogs about in the past. It's quite easy.

1] Know your FTP credentials for both services.

2] Log into your existing blog, and download everything. Make a copy of it on your hard drive. Grab the folder that contains \wp-admin, etc.

3] Use the wp-db-backup plugin to make a backup of your database. If the next step works, you wont actually need this file.

4] Go into the blog, then Tools, then Export. This is assuming you're using Wordpress 2.7. Create an export file, and keep it somewhere safe.

5] Upload the downloaded copy of Wordpress onto your new server. Make sure that all the details are correct in the wp-config.php file in the root. You'll probably need to change them for the new hosting company.

6] Once you've got Wordpress installed on the new server, go to the Dashboard, then Tools, then Import. Upload the file you created in step 4. You should now be good to go.

You'll also need to get your domain name provider to point the DNS to the new server. You can transfer the domain name into the new hosting company, probably, but that can be an extra hassle you don't need.
posted by Solomon at 3:53 PM on January 2 [2 favorites]

If you're having lots of downtime with dreamhost, press them to move you to a different server. I've been rock solid ever since they moved me 2 or 3 years ago. Remember, affordable hosting always means shared hosting... and shared hosting means your site's reliability is determined by the sites you share a server with.

Best of luck!
posted by 2oh1 at 4:46 PM on January 2

Step 1. Figure out where DNS for your domain is hosted (probably, but not necessarily, your registrar).

Step 2. A few days before you plan to switch your site over, reduce the TTL value on the DNS record for your website to the smallest value allowed.

Step 3. Export your wordpress DB using either a wordpress plugin, or whatever dreamhost provides for mySQL adminstration (like myphpadmin).

Step 4. Clean any crud out of your blog directory, then 'tar' and gzip it ("tar -zvcf blog.tgz blogdirectory"). You can also FTP it, but its faster if everything is archived into a single file.

Step 5. Transfer the backup of your DB, and the archive of your blog directory to your new server. Unpack the archive and put it in the document root for your website. Restore the DB backup into the new DB. Check to make sure wordpress is working by pointing your browser to either the appropriate IP address, or a temporary domain name you set up.

Step 6. Update the DNS to point to the new IP address.

Step 7. Confirm that requests are being directed to your new server. After a day or so, you can take down the old site and cancel your dreamhost account. Before you do though, make sure your DNS hosting is taken care of.


Micawebber, you don't have to spend a lot to get decent uptime from a shared hosting provider. Average uptime across Pair.com's ~600 web and DB servers is ~160days, which includes planned downtime for upgrades. That suggest that the average machine is rebooted 2.4x a year. Say it takes 10 minutes for each boot, which is pretty high, but allows plenty of room for those times when they actually have to swap hardware. That's 24 minutes of downtime a year (525,600 minutes). That's just for the system, and ignores any full or partial network outages, but that's pretty good, and Pair's PHP/mySQL hosting comes with a dedicated IP and runs about 2x what Dreamhost runs with a dedicated IP. Of course, they don't make ridiculous promises about available resources, but, well...
posted by Good Brain at 5:20 PM on January 2

This page contains detailed documentation about moving a WordPress installation to a new server. There are also links to easy tutorials for backing up and restoring files and databases.
posted by murtagh at 4:25 AM on January 3

"If you're having lots of downtime with dreamhost, press them to move you to a different server."
Yeah, Dreamhost is very patchy. I've had little downtime despite some big traffic surges, but my nephew's account has always been horribly slow and unreliable due to the web and file servers allocated.
posted by malevolent at 8:52 AM on January 3