How to switch or migrate from webhost to another new host

Recently i moved my hosting from bluehost to knowhost Sensehow migrated from bluehost to knownhost and since it was my first time switching my wordpress blogs from one hosting to another i got a lot of problems during migration.Initially i has asked knownhost customer care to migrate it free for me and they moved all my files and databases to knownhost by their inbuilt account to account importer.But in that method only my main domain in bluehost was working well and all the other add-on domains including sensehow.com went down for several hours.Initially i was not aware of this since the cached version of my blogs were visible to me and i was also able to login to admin panel.Then i noticed it was all before the name server propagation and was not the actual site that was moved to knownhost.So,below is a new working tutorial for moving your wordpress blog from one hosting to another without any downtime.

HOW TO SWITCH YOUR WORDPRESS BLOG TO NEW WEBHOST?

1.Initially go to your new webhost and signup for a webhosting account.You will be given with a name server for your new hosting account.For me it was NS1.AASLIN.COM and NS2.AASLIN.COM.

2.Goto your domain name account where you registered your domain name,for eg.godaddy and in domain manager dashboard of your domain name click Nameservers and add the new name servers in the 3 and 4th name server column.

3.Now goto your wordpress admin and de-activate all the plugins.Since infolinks,wp-super cache,easy adsense and some other plugins cause problems if you migrate without de-activating.For me when i moved hosting my website and wp-admin went inaccessible due to these plugins.(I had to delete them from cpanel file manager to access wp-admin)

4.Download all the files of your wordpress blog using any FTP client like filezilla of webftp and store it to your desktop temporarily.

5.Now go to phpmyadmin in your old webhost and bacnkup your database,to know how to backup your database using phpmyadmin http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database and save it as a SQL file in your desktop.

6.Then now go to your new webhost and create a database and database user with all privilages.(try to create in the same database name,username and password.If you are not able to you will have an additional step)

7.Now goto phpmyadmin in your new webhost and import the database that you had backed up in SQL format in your desktop.To know how to import a database in wordpress goto http://codex.wordpress.org/Restoring_Your_Database_From_Backup

8.Now using FTP upload all the files of your blog to the public_html folder of your new webhosting.If you are not able to use FTP,then just zip the folder using winzip or other and upload to your public_html folder.(You have to extract it after you upload it and then delete the zip file)

9.Now if you have created the database,username and password same matching to your old host skip this step.But if the database name is different go to your wp-config.php in your new host public_html folder and edit the database name,database username and password and save it.

10.Now go back to your domain name registrar and edit the nameserver settings and remove the old hosts nameserver for eg.remove NS1.BLUEHOST.COM ,NS2.BLUEHOST.COM and bring the New nameservers to the 1 and 2 position and save it.Now clear all your browsers cache and restart it and visit your website,it will be loaded from the new webhost.

11.Then go to wp-admin and re-enable all your plugins one by one.If there are any problems check all your chmod permissions for files from old host match with the chmod permissions in the new host,

Now you have successfull migrated your wordpress blog from one host to another new host,for me it was from bluehost to knownhost.

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