Tag Archives | Moving

How to Set Up a Purchased WordPress Website on Your Hosting Server – Part 1 of 2

This is a two part article describing how to move and set up a purchased WordPress website on your hosting server. The first part explains why you may want to purchased a WordPress site, how to transfer the domain and setting up the domain on your hosting server. Part two will take a closer look on how to install the websites database and configure some important WordPress settings.

Have you ever tried moving and setting up a purchased WordPress Website on Your Hosting Server. In case you purchased an existing WordPress website and domain and has no clue on how to move and set up WordPress website on my Hostgator hosting account, read on…

The reason you may not want to setup your own WordPress website from scratch may be because you want to speed up implementation time and take advantage of the fact that the domain has already some age and AdSense monetization working. So you would only have to use your SEO experience to improve Search Engine ranking for the niche keywords.

Lets take a real example but change the names. Bob is the guy who purchased the domain and blog and the lady, lets name her Maria, that had sold Bob the domain and corresponding WordPress website told him she would send him all the information needed, but what Bob received were two zipped backup files, one with the database sql import file and the other was the WordPress domain directory. The only indications regarding setting up the WordPress website Bob got were that he had to upload the files to his server. Was this all he needed to do? What do you think?

Even though WordPress is very easy to install and manage, moving an existing WordPress Website to your hosting server should be a little more complex than that. So Bob thought that there must be more to it, especially as the MySQL database file had another database prefix, which is usually your hosting account ID. The format is something like MYHOSTID_MYDBNAME; so let’s name Maria’s database file maria89_wpbd123.sql. Bob’s Database prefix is bob58.

I know that when you restore a MySQL database in cpanel that it takes the sql file name to import the tables it into the same-named database, or creates a new one. Bob tried it out and as a result a MySQL database named bob58_maria89wpbd123 was created. The database restore had stripped out the underscore and added Bob’s database prefix. Not very nice:-(

Bob then wrote Maria back asking for more details, and whether there were any specifics that he needed to take into account for moving, setting up or configuring her specific the WordPress website. She apologized and replied that she did not know how to handle this and suggested having a live chat with my hosting support provider. Maria probably thought that moving a WordPress website from one hosting server to another would be as easy as she initially said, so Bob could not count on her and did not insist futher. Bob’s hosting provider has an outstanding support, so this was not a too bad idea, but then he decided that he would first have a go on his own.

So here comes how Bob proceeded for moving, setting up and configuring her WordPress website on his hosting server…There may be a quicker way, but it worked great for him and, in the end, if you know some simple but important details, the set up is pretty straight forward. Let’s first outline the basic steps required to transfer the domain to and set up the WordPress website on your hosting server.

Transfer the domain to your domain service provider
Set up the domain on your hosting server
Upload the WordPress database files
Configure your WordPress website

What do you need before you start?

WordPress Database MySQL restore file, DBprefix_DBname.sql
The complete WordPress website directory
The current WordPress admin userid and password

So let’s go a little more into detail on each step of the set up process…

1. Transferring the domain to my domain service provider

If you have also purchased the corresponding domain, the very first step is to get the domain transferred to your domain service provider. This will be done by the owner. If you have the same domain service provider, this is usually very simple; it’s called “”pushing””.

Unfortunately Maria had another domain service provider than Bob is using. So to make things easy he created a free account with her domain service provider and would take care of transferring the domain to his provider later on. Maria then “”pushed the domain into his account, Bob accepted it, and then pointed the domain to his DNS server. That was the easy part.

2. Setting up the domain on your hosting server

Bob has a hosting plan, which includes unlimited add-on domains. He logged into his cpanel and created the new add-on domain. This is pretty simple, so I won’t go into more details here. Bob did NOT need to create a WordPress Blog Website installation. This is done by restoring the WordPress database and uploading the WordPress website directory files he got to the domain’s root directory.

Bob then entered my new domain name in the internet browser’s address bar and saw that all was working so far, because he could see the empty cgi-bin directory that is created by default.

Now Bob could upload the WordPress website directory content to the domain directory, located below the root directory; in his case KingKoilMattresse.net. You can either do this via FTP or use the cpanel > Files > Backups wizard.

Bob reentered the domain name in the internet browser address bar and got the expected database connection error. First of all he did not have the DB installed yet and the connection information would be incorrect anyway. We will see how this part of our WordPress website setup can be achieved.

In the final part of the article we will have a closer look on how to Upload the WordPress Database files and Configuring your WordPress Website.