I recently move my personal blog about my kids from a cpanel-type webhosting interface to Dreamhost’s own webhosting management dashboard, or something. Recently, meaning today.

Anyway, Matt-and-Sean.com is a stale blog that is supposed to be a photo journal of my boys but because of the webhosting’s storage constraint, I need to move it to my Dreamhost account which has unlimited bandwidth and storage.

I’ll be posting here how to move your WordPress blog from a cpanel webhosting to Dreamhost. But the main purpose of this blog post is a single tip on the mysql prefix thingy…

Basically, before you do anything, download/backup your original files from the cpanel webhosting company that you are in… in my case, I opened up matt-and-sean.com/cpanel went to the Backup section and downloaded the database.. That’s the file with an “sql” extension.

Also you can download and backup wp-content directory.. since it contains all your themes, plugins and all those previously uploaded pictures… if you don’t do it, the images from your previous posts wont show up… now that’s sad.

Here are the quick and dirty steps, and I wont put the details here.. If you stumble upon a problem, and you need the info, you can contact me for other details… Dont.

1. From matt-and-sean.com’ domain registrant (it’s from marvin’s web.. another story.. i dont want to tell you the hassle i’ve been through for it to be ‘released’), change the DNS setting to the one that Dreamhost is using, that is ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2…..

2. Setup matt-and-sean.com in Dreamhost.. You’ll just basically clicking “manage domains” –> “Add New Domain/Subdomain” and filling up the required information

3. Once that’s done, wait a couple of minutes to an hour until the whole internet knows the new matt-and-sean.com.

4. From Dreamhost’s dashboard, there’s this “One-Click Install” features which makes the 5-minute official WordPress installation guide to 2 minutes or less! I tell you, some people (I wont say people from PLRPro.com) even sell the idea to their members.

5. Before you can install WordPress, you will be required to make a user name for the database of even a database. Then after that, you’ll have a new and shinny wordpress blog with a “hello world” post in it.

6. Next, get your old blog up. Go to Database and click on the phpadmin..and import your original sql file.

7. Here’s the tip.. after importing, you may still wonder where’s all your post? Why is it only the “Hello World” post showing? Here’s the deal.

That’s the database tables that Dreamhost created automatically.. (before you import) .. after you import it will add the original/old database tables with different prefix!

That’s why matt-and-sean.com still displays the Hello World post even though my whole blog is in the database already..

What you need to do is to tell WordPress to read the newly imported database and not the one that Dreamhost autoinstall created.

How is that? By editing the wp-config.php file:

Simply edit the line to read wp_ (or whatever it is that your old blog was configured), save the file and you’re done!

Last thing, remember to use your old username and password.. remember, you’re using your old database!

That’s it, enjoy!

Quick post… I’m planning to do a makeover of my Pinoy banda “Pinoy Rock Bands” blog. I started doing this couple of days ago but it was last night that I was able to make a test site where I would, well, test the new ‘dress’. Hope it looks good on it. Another reason is (yeah, I procrastinate) I’m also looking for a great multimedia them for Matt and Sean’s Blog (which is of course, still under tweaking).

More update related to this on the coming posts… (so what, you might say… wala lang.)

Yep.. God!

Check the time difference between this post and the last one I did! I am surprised myself!

While my wife is out to buy some vitamins for our sons, I’m here in Burnaby registering a new domain on a new webhosting company!

Paypal money is an “easy come, easy go” money… That’s bad money if you ask me.

Congratulations, your purchase was successful.
Please review the following information. A confirmation of this purchase, along with your username and password, will be emailed to jacaranda9dbux@gmail.com. We appreciate your business, and look forward to serving you.

Your site will be visible by everyone within one business day.

DOMAIN INFORMATION

Too bad the original chat windows closed down… I should have posted it here too.. :D

Ann A. [10:16:45 PM]: Thank you for contacting the Sales Team. Please give me a moment while I review your question.

[10:16:50 PM]: Hi! How can I help you?

FIRST TIME SALES QUESTION [10:16:55 PM]: yeah, me again

[10:17:13 PM]: just want to ask if you’re a real person or a program or something..

Ann A. [10:17:34 PM]: I’m a real person! I hope they don’t make a program for this job.

FIRST TIME SALES QUESTION [10:17:42 PM]: lol, right..

[10:17:48 PM]: thanks again, i’ll go sign up

Ann A. [10:17:52 PM]: Good night!

That was the last part of our last tonight. Ann A. is the Sales Rep for BlueHost (a web hosting solution company).. She’s good.. She’s so good in answering my questions, I think I’ll go ahead and sign up for their service.

The main reason for it? Well, unlimited hosting space and bandwidth is super fine in my yard stick to measure, not to mention that they’ll put your site to a “less crowded” server if traffic got heavy.. plus, it’s 100 Mysql, free domain too and SSH access! Cool!

I’ve been inquiring about their service because I’m considering transferring my Movie Blog and other wordpress.com blog to BlueHost.

WordPress suspended my blogs because of suspected SPamming or SEO related thing.. (none of them was proven btw)… they just said that there’s a questionable links in http://elizar.palad.info. Of course there is.. im linking it.

Anyway, I wanted to buy a new domain anyway (blog about words and phrases), and thought of getting a new hosting (with new IPs) for it… My number of blogs are growing.. I may need to let go of some of them…

Listen to this everyone, coz there’s a quiz… Lolz. The reason for doing this post is that when browsing one of my blog hosted on a free webhosting service, I noticed that my blog is offline or ‘Unable to display page’. I can’t complain since, well, it is a free service…

Why is there a need to know if your website or blog are experiencing frequent downtimes?

The answer is simple, “When your website is unavailable or malfunctioning, it gives an unprofessional and negative image to your organization and leads to income losses.”

If the case of Adsense bloggers who’s been doing some SEO and some keyword optimization, having an offline blog is synonymous to potential click loss and that means loss of $$$.

How would we know if our site is down?

One sure way of checking if you’re site is up or down is to visit it. If it displays, it’s up, if it didn’t well, sorry but it’s inaccessible.

Problem with that is you can’t do that manual checking at regular interval or on different location. There could be some DNS/resolution problem where you’re blog can be accessible here and not in the United States or somewhere else.

These is where monitoring sites come in handy.

Free Monitoring Sites

Best thing in life is free ayt? Well yeah, sure it is.. but you have to live with the limitations of being free.

I fast-Googled some free monitoring service we can use to monitor our blogs uptime/downtime. This is by no means the best out there but just to show that these programs exist that I’m presenting them to you.

• Montastic – “The best website monitoring service that doesn’t suck” featuring email notification when your site goes up or down, read statuses via RSS or Yahoo widget, fun, easy and elegant user interface, and no unreasonable limit on the number of websites monitored.
• Internet vista – Site checks every 60 minutes, with additional features.
• UpPanel – A website monitoring service that watches your website for any downtime, with advanced monitoring systems.
• Others: ServerMojo | Basic State

There, go ahead and create an account… I myself created one on Internet vista.. and will create on on Montastic just to see how it works. (though I have a pretty good idea).

I just transfered my “All About… ” blog to YRHOST, where this blog and pinoybanda is hosted and currently checking my adsense performance… So far, it looks good. I’ll share the outcome soon, so visit back alright?

Anyway, if you have a better monitoring service you can suggest, please comment it out below… and help a fellow blogger.

Mabuhay!