By oryagel on

I need to move my site hosted with Godaddy to rackspace.
The site in Godaddy seats in MYXXXX.com/drupal
I want to move it to rackspace to MYZZZZ.net

I tried to copy the content of the drupal folder from godaddy (/drupal) to the root of the domain in rackspace (/www.MYZZZZ.net/web/content/).
That didn't work, I got blank page.

If i put a fresh install of drupal to rackspace it does work.
I read about the issue and i understood that it should be related to the settings.php or to the .htaccess.
I don't know what should I change in those files.

What should I do in order to complete the process?

Regards,
oryagel

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

steveparks’s picture

steveparks commented

Hello oryagel,

To move a drupal site you need to move the codebase and the database. Here's a quick walkthrough...

1. Move the codebase

I guess Godaddy doesn't give you shell (command line) access to your server, so you're using FTP. So you'll need to connect with your server using FTP, copy all the file to your local computer and then copy them back to the live server. Make sure you get all the files including two hidden files - the .htaccess files in the root and in the files directory. You may need to alter an option in your FTP programme to show hidden files, in order to copy those properly.

While the codebase is on your local PC check the settings.php file, presumably in your sites/default directory. (If it's in a sites/MYXXXXX.com.drupal directory then you'll need to move this to a sites/MYZZZZZ.net directory). Have a look at what is set for the database connection - this will need to be changed to reflect the new database your new host will have provided. On rackspace you may well be in control of your own mysql, so you'll need to create a new database and a database user (which you clearly know how to do if you did a fresh drupal install there, so i won't go into that)
Also have a look to see whether a base URL is set - which will need to be changed if it is.

2. Move the database

I presume Godaddy give you access to your database server via a web user interface like PHPMyAdmin. From here you need to create a SQL 'dump', which you can save to your local computer.
This sql file needs to be imported into the new database - either by uploading the file to the server and importing it via the mysql command line, or by uploading it via phpmyadmin.

If a new drupal install worked (and you hadn't changed .htaccess on your old installation) then you shouldn't need to change anything in .htaccess this time.
So if things still aren't working, check the settings.php file. It's quite well documented, so read through each section.

It's also worth checking the settings of the ownership and access control for the files uisng chown and chmod at the command line (google for help on those if you're not familiar). You'll need to know what user your webserver runs as (probably www-data) and change the ownership of uploaded files to this using chown.

It's amazing how often problems with moving files around are down to the ownership issues - so do check this out.

Anyway, hope this is helpful, and good luck!

Steve

===
Steve Parks
Convivio - a digital services agency

http://weareconvivio.com

j0e’s picture

j0e commented

Once you move to Rackspace from Godaddy (perhaps other hosts too), you will need to check .htaccess and uncomment RewriteBase / otherwise it doesn't get past the homepage. Also this is the spot where Rackspace will check for the php memory limit, rather than php5.ini Obviously it's a bit late to respond to this poster, but to anyone else, hope this bit of info helps and: Good luck with your move!
Joseph