Smithology

Just some housekeeping. I’ve upgraded Smithology to Wordpress 2.7 and moved it from Slicehost to Dreamhost. A few little bells and whistles have stopped working – I will need to upgrade the template and plugins some time or other.

The move from Slicehost is just a finance thing. Awhile back a friend and I had a plan to host some stuff on a slice with the idea of building our empire into a glorious conquest of the internet but I severely underestimated the way having kids would affect my motivation when it comes to after work computer hacking. So I’ve moved (almost) all my little blogs and sites onto Dreamhost which is a lot cheaper than Slicehost for what I’m doing now which is nothing much. My opinion of Slicehost remains very high: you get a virtual linux server that you can do with as you please right from the OS up and for a decent price. Dreamhost is fine for blogs and mucking about with an online shop or whatever where as Slicehost is where you go when you’ve got real traffic and real uptime requirements with a plan for expansion.

As far as moving blogs, the process went as follows:

• export the DB in phpmyadmin
• tar up the web root
• turn off all the plugins
• untar the new wordress and copy it over the top of the old blog
• surf to the admin and do the upgrade
• check that things kind of work. I had to delete some old plugins that made wordpress die
• tar.gz up the webroot again
• export the db again
• copy the tarballs of the upgraded blog to dreamhost
• setup the domain in dreamhost and install wordpress in advanced mode (but don’t click the install link in the email it sends you)
• wait until you get the email that it’s done (takes a minute or two)
• untar and copy the blog onto the domain under your home dir
• do a mysql -u username -p -h mysql.server.whateveryousetup blogdbname < db_bak.sql where db_bak.sql is the dump from your blog db
• manually override the dns in your /etc/hosts file and test the new install.
• While doing that, turn on the plugins and see what happens
• change the dns settings to use ns1.dreamhost.com etc…

simple ;-) It took me a couple of hours of mucking about but I reckon you could get it down to half an hour with practice.

Uncategorized dreamhost, slicehost, upgrade, wordpress