Joomla can be transferred from an old to a new hosting without difficulty and in a few steps, to find it fully functioning on the new Web space.
Sometimes you find yourself working on hosting accounts whose quality leaves a lot to be desired, but you want to change providers simply because you don’t know how to transfer your site, maybe made with a CMS like Joomla, from the old account to the new hosting service.
In fact, transferring Joomla from the old hosting to the new one is easier than you think. The important thing is, of course, to be sure of the choice of the new hosting, perhaps relying on long-time providers, which offers suitable and efficient hosting packages.
Once the new hosting has been activated, all that remains is to follow 5 simple steps to transfer your Joomla site (with all the annexes and connected) from the old to the new space, and then find it fully functional at the end of the procedure.
Below, the manual method will be indicated, but in the next appointment a really functional plugin will be proposed, which takes care of doing the dirty job of the transfer on behalf of the user and thus makes the transition of Joomla from an even simpler hosting.
1 # Transfer Joomla: Database Backup
Using the authentication credentials to the phpMyAdmin of the old hosting provider, log in to the database management console. The addresses to reach the phpMyAdmin console vary depending on the provider and in any case are indicated together with the accesses in the service activation email. If they are not available, ask your provider for help.
Once you have accessed, locate the Joomla installation database (normally recognizable by the use of letters in the database name and tables such as joom, jos, etc.) and click on it with the left mouse button. At this point, click above on Export. In the new screen choose the Custom item, choose the item Compressed with gzip from the Compression drop-down menu, leave all other values unchanged and scroll the page until you reach the Execute button. Click on it and save the generated file locally and wait for the download to finish.
2 # Transfer Joomla: Backup of files via FTP
Start FileZilla or your favorite FTP client. Above, fill in the fields Host, Username, Password and Port with the access data provided by the old hosting provider Joomla. Click Quick Connect to establish a connection with the site’s FTP server.
Once inside, double-click on the public_html folder and, if necessary, on the folder that could contain the files related to the Joomla installation (normally recognizable from its name). Once the files are displayed in the right panel, move with the mouse on the left panel, reach the folder of your PC where to save the Joomla files and in a white space of the left window right click with the mouse.
From the contextual menu, choose the item Create the folder and enter it and click on it with the pointer. Indicate the name of the folder and confirm with a click on OK.
Go back to the right panel, select all the files with the mouse and move the files from the right to the left panel with a drag & drop of the pointing device, where the empty folder just created awaits them.
Wait for the transfer to end, considering that the process could last a long time depending on the amount of content on the Joomla site to be transferred.
3 # Transfer Joomla: The right database on hosting
At this point, all the files necessary for the proper functioning of the Joomla installation are available. For this, it is necessary to carry out the operations contrary to those until now carried out, loading the database and the files saved locally on the hosting servers or of the destination provider.
Assuming that the transfer is made, once the hosting account has been activated, access your MySQL profile from MySQL access panel, entering the login data contained in the welcome email.
Once inside, select one of the five databases available and click on it with the mouse. Here, click Importand then click Choose file to choose the SQL archive generated and downloaded from the old provider’s database. Confirm by clicking on Run.
A successful message will indicate that the operation has been completed successfully.
4 # Transfer Joomla: The files go to the FTP
Always using FileZilla, connect to the FTP account provided.
However, remember that the FTP access filter is active based on IP addresses. To proceed, then, connect to the Users Area, enter the User and the Access Password as indicated in the hosting service activation email and click Continue. In the Domain Management, click on the Control Panel button of the domain of interest. From the side menu, click on Linux Hosting and on the FTP Access Filter sub-item. At the top, next to the User indication, you see the navigation IP. Select it with the mouse and copy it, pasting it in the field Your IP address of navigation. Then click on Add IP.
Enter the captcha text and click Save. Exit the control panel and start the FileZilla client on the PC. As before, fill in the fields Host, Username, Password and Port as indicated in the services activation email.
Click with the mouse on the folder relative to the domain name and on the left panel reach the local folder where the files from the old hosting were saved in step two. Select all the files in the left panel and always move the files in the right panel with the usual drag & drop. Wait for the upload to end.
5 # Transfer Joomla: The configuration.php file
In the folder containing all the Joomla files downloaded from the old hosting, there is a file called configuration.php … This file contains information about the Joomla installation and how the CMS can communicate with the database.
Open this file with a text editor like Notepad (avoid Word and other similar word processors) and locate the following section:
public $ host = ‘localhost’;
public $ user = ‘vecchio_username_database’;
public $ password = ‘old_password_database’;
public $ db = ‘old_name_database’;
The information indicated must be replaced with the IP address of the database (in place of localhost or of 127.0.0.1), with the new username of the database (instead of old_username_database), the new password (instead of vecchia_password_database) and the new one name of the database (in place of the old database_name).
Also in this file, there are lines to edit:
public $ log_path = ‘/ home / sites / YOURDOMAIN / public_html / logs’;
public $ tmp_path = ‘/ home / sites / YOURDOMAIN / public_html / tmp’;
To find out what values to insert after the = sign, download this PHP file, upload it to your FTP hosting and visit www.tuonomedominio.tua extension / path.php from your browser. The paths indicated below are those that must be inserted between the quotes after the sign =.
Save the modified file and upload it via FTP to the Joomla hosting space, overwriting the old one. Also remember to delete the path.php file.
Successful Joomla transfer!
Here it is! In just five steps the Joomla site was transferred without difficulty from the old provider to the new hosting and everything is working properly. It remains only to evaluate the update of the DNS if the domain name is managed by another provider. In fact, in this case, the DNS for the resolution of the domain name must be pointed directly to the Joomla hosting to which the transfer was made.
