Learning how to move a WordPress site from one hosting account to another is a very useful skill to acquire.
The 2 situations where it comes in most useful are
1. When you sell a website and need to transfer it to the purchaser (this is a good offer to make when listing your site on sites like Flippa.com as many newbies are happy to buy a site when they know that you will set it up for them)(Read flipping websites also)
and
2. When you choose to move your site from one hosting company to another for seo reasons. For example if your site is targeting the Irish market and you want to rank well in Google.ie as opposed to Google.com you will rank better if your site is hosted on Irish servers rather than servers in the U.S. for example.
So, how do you actually move it?
Firstly keep in mind that a WordPress site will come in 2 parts-the database which holds all of the site’s content and the site files which will contain all of the plugins, themes and WordPress software script.
1. Go to your own file manager on your hosting account, navigate to the files for the site you wish to move and select all and then compress them into a zip file.
2. Download this zip file to your desktop.
3. Right click on the wp config file and take a look inside the file to ascertain the name of the database.
4. Go to PHP MyAdmin and locate the database that you identified from the wp config file.
5. Export this database and save it in a folder.
6. Get a editing program like Notepad++ or EditPad lite (they are free).
7. Go to your domain registrar and change the DNS settings to the location of where you want to transfer the site(this will be the new location for the site).
8. Go to the destination hosting account.
9. Create a new add on domain first which will be the domain name for the site.
10. Open the database that you downloaded at 5 above with your editing software.
11. Hit Control F and find all instances of the home directory in the database that you need to replace-this will be the home directory on your own hosting account and where the site resided before transfer.
12. Replace all of the old home directory designations with the new; for example if my hosting account’s home directory is /home/webdesigndublin and the new hosting account is /home/abscccc replace all instances of /home/webdesigndublin in the database with /home/abscccc.
13. Make sure to save the database file.
14. Create a new database with the MySql database wizard at the new hosting location.
15. Create a user and connect the database to the user and check “all privileges”.
16. Go to pHp MyAdmin and import the database files for the site into your newly created database.
17. Go to your new hosting account’s file manager and delete the cgi bin which is the only file that should be there.
18. Import the site files that you saved at 2 above by uploading it through your file manager or ftp programme like Filezilla.
19. Once uploaded extract it as it will be in a zip file.
20. Open the wp config file and change 3 items-the database name, username and password which you will have created at 14 and 15 above.
That’s it!
Your new site should work fine in it’s new location.
Transferring a site for the first time can be a little tense; however once you follow the steps above you should be fine and after that it will be a piece of cake.
This is a very useful skill to have for flipping websites and search engine optimisation purposes as outlined at the beginning of this piece.
Filed under Search Engine Optimisaton Ireland, Website Flipping 
Website flipping is, like flipping property, the practice of building or buying websites, enhancing their value and selling them for a profit.
There are a number of ways of engaging in flipping websites and this piece will look at one specific deal in the last few days which allowed me to make a nice profit with one of my websites.
You will see from the screenshot that the site sold for it’s buy it now price of $1,495 and that there were 17 people watching the auction before it finished. This site had about 40 articles on it and had made a nice bit of income over the previous 12 months averaging around $100 per month.
The financials
Here is a breakdown of how profitable this site and ultimate disposal was: firstly the content was outsourced to writers that I use at a cost of $5 per article so the total investment here was around $200.
I had virtually no hosting cost for the site as I had it hosted on a hosting account with approximately 70 other sites which costs around $9 per month in total.
The domain name PrefabGaragesReport.com cost $9.
The income over the 12 months turned out at around $1,200 and the ultimate selling price of $1,495 meant a very profitable return for a very small investment. (You will note that all of the figures are in US dollars as this tends to be the only currency that is used online in most global websites; perhaps it might be a good idea to become familiar with the US dollar with the turmoil in the Euro currency now anyway!)
Website flipping strategy
The way to really make nice money with deals like this one is to scale up your operations through outsourcing.
If you know what you are doing you can really scale this significantly by outsourcing the content creation to online content/article writers all around the world and carrying out the necessary research yourself.
Massive market
The market for websites like this on sites like Flippa.com is stunning and I have had interest and bidders from all around the world including Hawaii, the US, Canada, Serbia, India, the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia and many other regions.
The reason for this is simple: the dream of making money online and autopilot income is an irresistible one and the amount of interest in sites that I have sold on Flippa.com has been really stunning. (The previous week I also sold a site for small money, $395, and it too had 17 people watching and bidding in the auction).
Website flipping does offer great opportunities to make money on the internet provided you know what you are doing, what type of website to build and how to build them. Scaling up the task is then pretty simple as there are a huge number of sites online which allow you to outsource all kinds of work such as content creation, header design and so on.
You could of course do a lot of this work yourself but your progress will be slower writing good, keyword focused content cannot be rushed so it makes sense to outsource.
Check out building niche websites and car crash marketing on Twitter..
Filed under Website Flipping
