I am a undergraduate student, I maintain  this tiny site by  my own. I don’t have a  very large blog  hence I can’t waste my  money in professional hosting services. I use free hosting service, free template, free plug-ins , FOSS software  …. and yes, wordpress is also free . That mean I  have invested my money only in Domain name registration (I can afford INR  400 to 500  per year    ).

Earlier I was using a host (of course free) which was providing a huge space but bandwidth was very low. I didn’t bothered as my site  didn’t have so much user. I was totally satisfied with it until I found a Hosting Service which was providing  a large number of professional services, that also completely FREE. They were providing Mail Server, FTP server,  (of coarse they were providing  PHP, and mySQL),  ROR(Ruby on the Rail), Pearl ,Pythone ,Lua,Apache Handeler,Index Manager,frontpage extention, CGI centre, password protected directory, IP deny manager,Hotlink protection,Leech Protection,and lot of other services which I don’t need or I don’t know how to use. But there was a term to keep running your hosting  the service free and running:you have to keep posting quality post to their forum and help other user. Which was not a problem to me, as soon as your post will increase your size and bandwidth will increase. They were calling it “Community Hosting Service”. I simply fall in love with it. I keep posting to their forum and earned 512 mb space and huge bandwidth (which I didn’t need) .

Then I got a feeling that I soon as possible, I should move my wordpress site to this new host. As I was not using professional host there was no one to assist me. Mainly I had a fear of loosing comments on my posts. Then I start experimenting with my localhost and realized that shifting wordpress  is very easy. Due to export and import feature of new versions of wordpressto, shifting to  anywhere have become a child’s play, it don’t require any technical knowledge. Please don’t read this post if you already know this. I am here elaborating how to move wordpress here and there.

Exporting and back-up: Before moving your site go to the dashboard of your site and find export option under Tool.  Export option will export your posts and comment will contain your posts, pages,   categories, comment and tags.   in wordpress specific wxr format. wxr stand for WordPress Extended RSS. You can download exported wxr file in only two clicks!

Additional step: It’ll be better if you also backup (download) your site directory using ftp client (e.g. fileZilla)

Now you can freely move your wordpress to anywhere without any fear of loosing your posts,pages and comments.

I. Moving in same domain

Suppose you have your wordpress in www.yourdomain.com (root) directory and you want to move your site to www.wordpress.com/blog directory.

If you have done with exporting part, it  is very easy to move your site.

1. Drop the database using phpMyadmin

2. Delete all the wordpress file in your root directory.

3.Upload wordpress (that is in the zip format) in your root directory using ftp client or your online file manager.

4.Extract the wordpress in your root directory.After extracting, you will get a directory named wordpress in your root directory

5. Rename the directory :wordpress to “blog” or whatever you want

6.open www.yourdomain.com./blog in the browser, you will see option of installing wp, Fill the detail (database name, user id , password,email Id etc.) If you haven’t created database and user Id, create it first using phpMyadmin

7. Now come to importing part, In your  dashboard go to tool>import. In import window select wordpress (you have to import wordpress, isn’t it?). You will get option to  install wordpress importer plug-in while importing ( Dashboard>tool>import >wordpress) if  it’s not already installed.

8.After installing and executing the plug-in, you will get the following window, select the wxr file the you had exported from your old site and click on “upload and import”

9. All done!! now install themes, plug-ins as much as you want!!!

II.Moving to a different host

All the steps are same as as the above section except some DNS mapping work.

To move your wordpress to a different host, first you have to change your NAME-SERVER to the NAME-SERVER of new host.

1.Go to control panel of your domain name. Scan the panel for the NAME-SERVER. replace the existing NAME-SERVER to the NAME-SERVER of your new host.

2.Go to control panel (sometimes called v panel, c panel, vista panel, etc..) of your new host. Scan for add on domain or add domain. Add the domain by filling necessary information.

3. After adding domain a directory with the name of domain will be created in the public_html,www or htdocs directory on your host.

4.No do same as the above section(moving to same domain)

5. That’s all!!!

If you have still any question , please leave your question. I will try to answer them. Please comment If you liked or disliked my post. I’ll appreciate it.