Yesterday I wrote a post explaining how to move your WordPress install within your website/server.  Today I wanted to cover how to move your WordPress install to a completely different server.

Again, the flexibility of WordPress shines, making this not overly difficult to accomplish.  If you aren’t changing your domain name, all you need to do is update your wp-config.php file and upload all of your files to their new server.

If you are changing your domain name with your move, here is the information you’ll need:

1. Backup your WordPress database.
2. Download the complete WordPress install to your hard drive and identify the folder as your OLD installation.
3. Login into your old blogs dashboard and update the Settings to reflect the website and blogs new location (both fields should be the same).
4. Now, download the complete WordPress install to your hard drive, but this time identify the folder as your NEW installation.  This will include the settings change you just made.
5. Download a copy of your WordPress database (keeping the old one) and then upload it to the new server.  You’ll want to keep the same database name and recreate the user login information (you can use your same user name and password).  If you change the database name, you’ll need to update your wp-config.php file to reflect the change.
6. Upload your NEW installation folder so that your blog is now working in its new location!

If you want to keep your old blog, you’ll need to upload the OLD folder to the OLD location of your blog and readjust the General Settings tab.

Another way to accomplish all of this is to simply make a fresh WordPress install and export/import your posts to the new location.   This isn’t the most ideal method, but it is much easier and will get the job done.

For additional information, you’ll want to consult the WordPress Codex.

In the past I’ve talked about some great WordPress plugins for backing up your database.   This is a great way to backup your WordPress blog for people that don’t know how to do it manually.   You can also set it up to do your backup automatically, which I find extremely useful because I run several websites that need backed up.

Throughout the past few years I been fortunate to meet a lot of bloggers, and I’ve found that many prefer to avoid plugins as much as possible, or sometimes they are just the kind of people that like to be hands on and learn how to do things themselves.   For these people, Performancing recently posted a Bloggers Guide To Safely Backing Up Your WordPress Site, where they detail the steps you need to take to manually backup your WordPress blog.

As a quick note, if you decide you want to manually backup your WordPress blog, you’ll first need to make sure you have FTP access for your website and the ability to access your Control Panel (CPanel).   From there you will want to follow the steps in Performancing’s guide to create a backup of your posts and a backup of your database.

This guest post was written by Keith Dsouza of Techie-Buzz. Keith is a WordPress enthusiast who has contributed numerous WordPress plugins to the WordPress community. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a guest post for Hack WordPress, please contact me.

Disasters are unavoidable and could happen any day, your server could have a crash one day and you will be left with nothing. Maybe your database will crash and you will lose all your posts. Your blog could be hacked too and someone may just delete all your posts. These are some things that could happen any day to anyone.

Taking precautions to safe guard your WordPress Blog is one of the best option to stay on top of it. The key to remember is that your database is the backbone of your blog, if you lose it your blog will be bankrupt, having a regular backup is they key to keep your blog up and running at all times.

WordPress is a platform that has many great developers working for it and providing with numerous amounts of plugins that could help to overcome the unavoidable.

WordPress Database Backup is a handy and blog saving plugin that will help you take daily backups of your database, you can either run the backup manually or setup cron tasks (scheduled tasks) to send you a backup of your database on a day to day basis.

The cron tasks have been introduced since WordPress 2.1 and if you do not have the latest version you should upgrade your WordPress installation first.

Below are some detailed instructions and tips on how to use the WordPress Database Backup plugin to setup cron tasks to automatically send you emails every day so you have the latest copy whenever you require it.

Step 1

Download and activate the WordPress Database Plugin for your blog.

Step 2

Click on the Manage option in the Admin panel navigation and from there click on the Backup link in the submenu.

Step 3

Once you are in the backup page, you will see a lot of options. Scroll down till you see an option to schedule a backup. In the scheduled backup you will see various options to schedule you backup.

You can schedule a backup varying upon how frequently you post on your blog. The best option is too choose a daily backup of your database. You will also be given an option to choose the database tables you want to backup. By default all core WordPress tables are backed up.

While making a choice to backup other tables you should only choose those that are critical to running of your blog, if you choose all the tables there are chances that the script may fail due to reading huge data.

If you want to backup all the tables the best option is to run the task manually and only email critical data to you every day.

That’s it with three simple steps you can save your blog from liquidation and always be sure that you are one step ahead of failures. You just have to follow the steps once and then you can ensure that you have a plan against disaster.

If you run a self-hosted WordPress blog and have been blogging for awhile, you have probably poored some blood, some sweat, and even some tears into your work.   A lot of us are very passionate about blogging and end up investing a lot of time into our blogs.   It also serves for many of us as a way to make money.  As a result, it can be extremely important to backup your blog weekly, if not more often, to ensure that your work will still be available if something goes wrong.

About a week ago MakeUseOf wrote a great post titled 4 free tools for fool-proof WordPress backup, which does a great job covering some tools you can use to safeguard your work.  After reading this post, I figured this would be a good opportunity to talk a bit about backing up your blog, and the free WordPress available to use.

The first plugin I wanted to cover is one of my favorite WordPress plugins, known as WP-DB Manager.  This plugin is designed to be a more advanced database management system.   It will actually add a Database tab to your dashboard which allows you to fully manage it.  Management options range from backing up your database, restoring your backups that you’ve previously made, optimizing and repairing your database, or even delete your unused tables (typically used for old plugins tables you no longer use).  This plugin will give you the most control, but requires some advanced use to setup and use.

If you feel this plugin may be a little to advanced for you and just need the backup, I recommend using an alternative plugin known as Wordpress Database Backup.   This plugin will basically allow you to backup your database with the click of a button and download it, add it to your FTP, or even have it e-mailed to you.  It also allows you to schedule automatic backups to be e-mailed to you.  The biggest drawback with this plugin is that it doesn’t offer an easy way to restore your database from the backup if something comes up.