Having just gone through a bit of down time (2 whole days), I thought I might lend out some free advice for all of you Wordpress users who are considering switching servers or hosts.  My host sent out an email about a month ago encouraging it’s customers to let them switch us over to a new control panel with much additional disk space and bandwidth.  The new control panel even allows a user like me, with the basic package, to utilize up to eight different SQL databases, all for just $5.95.  And the additional disk space and bandwidth was massive.  This seemed like an easy choice to make. 

The way my host went about the process seemed logical enough.  They wanted me to be able to test my website and files, before the full switch took place.  In order to accomplish this they set up a temporary ip address to demonstrate the success of the new server.  After I had a chance to look things over I contacted my registrar and changed the DNS names.  During the temporary period my base webpage worked fine (debtprison.net).  But there was no way to test the Wordpress function to see if it worked properly.  At least when I clicked on the blog link it worked.  I’m not sure exactly what happened, but after the switch my root page worked but the Wordpress link just produced a white page.

Just before the switch I made a backup of my Wordpress files using the ‘Wordpress Database Backup’ plugin.  After the switch I had to change the name of the public files that the config.php was looking for.  This was just part of the change and my host had mentioned as much in the email they sent out.  After making that change in the config.php file, the Wordpress page stated it could not connect to the Database.  Inside the config.php file it names the database file it’s looking for.  Well, that explained a lot because the database it was looking for didn’t exist.  I’m assuming my host should have created this database and dumped my Wordpress files into it.  But they didn’t do this.  In fact they were absolutely no help.  I had to work through this on my own…..and it was all new territory to me.

My host was unable to locate my old files.  So I created a new Database, uploaded my files from the backup I had made using Filezilla, into the new database I had created.  I then changed the name of the database in the config.php file so it would now be reading the correct database.  But my troubles are not yet over….

I’m not sure exactly why this occurred, but after the backup was installed, the config.php file was corrected, and the blog came up just like normal - but at the end of every single sentence of every article was a question mark.  This question mark occurred after the period at the end of each sentence.  We thought perhaps it was the language the backup was saved in, or the server was using, but nothing seemed to work. 

During the install of the backup files it asked me two questions of which I was unsure.  On asked me about the type of language the backup was made in (there was a list of about 25).  I didn’t know the answer to this.  It also asked something about the SQL language.  I didn’t know the correct response here either.  Perhaps if I had spent some time at Wordpress.org forums looking for an answer I could have found one.  But Debt Prison had been down for 2 days and that was enough down time for me.  I spent the following day removing the question marks.  It only took seven hours…

The moral of the story is to backup often.  I think my new php.admin function allows me to make a backup of the database - but that’s something I’m still looking into. 

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