Just couple of hours back I changed the hosting service provider of my this WordPress blog. The former service provider was giving me very low bandwidth and that was consumer in the first twenty days of this month. I have not came across any big hassle in shifting to new servers. But I do experienced some things that I wanted to share.

Always have backup

That’s your all investment. And never underestimate their importance. Always take backups of your contents and your database. At any point of time there could be things when you need them badly and you can not access your FTP/DB server. From now onwards I am also going to make this a habit. It always pays well in future.

Taking backup by phpMyAdmin

When I was taking the backup of my database, I noticed phpMyAdmin does not include the script of create database if not exist in the SQL file. You should create a database with the same name that is mentioned in your wp-config.php file. And need to create the same user too. Associating that user with newly created database is the next part and giving that user the privileges (all). After these steps, you are good to import your this SQL backup file to your new server’s phpMyAdmin

The .htaccess file

Some time for permalink settings we do editting in .htaccess files that usually present in the root directory of your server. (if you are not running mydomain.com/blog strtucture, in this case this file will be in blog directory). Take care of this file too when takeing backup. Some FTP browsers does not show this file. So must ensure to copy this file if your have created or it exists. If you never created this, dont bother.

Prevent hot linking of  images

You can save your bandwidth by preventing the hotlinking of your image files outside of your blog. People usually do this, when they link your image file on their webpages to save their storage. And they start eating your bandwidth. So with some WordPress plugin you can prevent it. I am looking that plugin. I will update this post when I will find some suitable plugin.

Happy blogging.