If you want to know how to move a whole site database from one host to another (say, from Godaddy to Dreamhost), this article is a must read. It will show and explain the whole process of exporting and importing a database (or to be more precise, all of its tables) using phpMyAdmin, the default MySQL database administrator. It is meant for those who don’t have Administrator access to phpMyAdmin (and cannot create databases from inside phpMyAdmin).

Let’s begin. First, you need to export your website’s database tables from the old host. To do so, access phpMyAdmin via your hosting panel (it’s Domain->Databases->DBWebAdmin for Plesk, and CPanel should have something similar), click on the database name (so that you see all the tables in the main window), then click on the “Export” tab at the top.

You should see the following export window. Click “Select All” to select all the tables and make sure the SQL radio button is checked. At the bottom, check “Save as file”, put in a file name (in this case it’s “mydb”), select Compression: “zipped” or “gzipped” to make the file smaller (this will help a lot if your host has a limit on the size of the database and tables you can upload) and click “Go” to get the file ( you may have to wait for a while, especially if the web server is slow and the file is big). Optionally, you may change the other parameters if your host told you that you need to or you know what you’re doing.

After you’ve saved the file, you need to create a new database at your new host. It is very desirable to assign it the same name, username and password as the old one; because otherwise your site won’t work and you’ll have to change the database settings inside the website configuration file (usually config.php or something like that). Go to your hosting panel and create it (I assume you know how to do it).

After it’s ready, open the phpMyAdmin for the new database and click on the database name ((like you did for the old one), only this time there should be no tables present and you should continue by clicking on “Import”. Here you need to select the file you just saved to your computer and click on “Go” (the other options are good by default in most cases).

After a while (depending on the speed of the server and your Internet connection), you should see an “Import has been successful” message and the tables of your database appear in the left window.

In the rare case when your database is bigger than the upload limit, you will have to export and import tables part by part (i.e. export/import the first 20, then the next 20 and so on). Kind of hard, but at least you can do it.
Now all you have to do is copy the contents of the “httpdocs” or “public_html” to you new host via FTP and optionally modify the files which contain the database name, password and username (search Google to find out how to do it for your software, like “how to change database username in Joomla”), then, if you already moved your domain name or registered another one (and modified the proper files), you should be able to access your old site on the new host. Congratulations!

This article will cover a few of the techniques and tools used by professional web developers, designers and programmers in their work to test new code and improve their software/websites. Many people don’t know about this, and end up spending much more time on testing (uploading, changing code, troubleshooting) than needed.
This will be very useful to you if you are just starting out in any web development language like PHP, ASP, Javascript and others or if you just have a site that you want to maintain and improve yourself.

Let me start by saying that professionals rarely change and test their code via an FTP client right on their web server. This is because it takes a lot of time to download, edit and re-upload a file via FTP (especially when you’re changing just a line or two of code, or your Internet connection speed is less than stellar) and because they don’t want their visitors to notice any strange things on the website while they are testing the code.

So, what do they do?
They work and test everything locally, which means they have a copy of their website and database in a folder on their computer and they change those files and see the results immediately in any web browser. I’m going to show and explain a few tools used for this purpose in Windows (Linux and Mac OS X are a little different, although you can easily use the tips here for those Operating Systems, too).

To be able to see your website on your computer via any web browser requires you to install a web server (Apache, Microsoft IIS, Lighttpd or any other) on your computer and route it to your localhost IP address (which is 127.0.0.1 by default). If this seems complicated, don’t worry, it is not!

Installing a web server for testing purposes on your Windows machine is as easy as installing Mozilla Firefox, MS Office or any other application. It is a simple matter of downloading an installer and running it.
There are 2 best programs for this purpose: WAMPServer (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP Server) and XAMPP (Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris). While XAMPP is cross-platform and has Perl support, I prefer WAMPServer because it is simpler to install, configure and use.
To download it, go to http://www.wampserver.com/en/download.php and click “Download WampServer” (optionally you can download any version of MySQL, Apache & PHP from the Addons page). After installing, start it up and you should see a tray icon (that looks like a speedometer) showing its status.

It must be white with the arrow pointing to the right. If it is yellow or red, then something is wrong. Most of the times WAMP has problems running along with a firewall, antivirus or Skype. In my case, I had ESET Smart Security (which acts as a firewall and antivirus) and Skype installed and got an error the first time I started WampServer, then the icon was yellow all the time. It was quite annoying and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what’s wrong.
I’m going to save you a lot of time by telling you the solutions to these problems.

First, if you have ESET SS (quite a fitting name for its very strict firewall , turn the firewall and the antivirus off before starting WampServer for the first time by right-clicking on the tray icon, then clicking “Do not filter network traffic (Disable Firewall)” and “Disable Real-time file system protection”.

If you are really worried about your machine’s security, you may leave the file system protection online and disable only the firewall. It should work, but if it doesn’t, you have to disable the antivirus, too.
After doing that, start WampServer. If it gives no errors and the tray icon is white, then everything started correctly and should now work. You can re-enable ESET Smart Security, and the next time you start WampServer, you shouldn’t have to do this again.
To test if it’s working, open your favorite browser, type “localhost” (or http://localhost/) in the address bar and press “Enter”. You should see a test page describing WAMPServer (in my case it was a simple line of text inside an index file).

Now, if the tray icon is yellow AND you have Skype enabled, then WAMP conflicts with it. Here’s what you need to do:
Open Skype, go to Tools->Options->Advanced->Connection and uncheck the “Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections” checkbox. Skype will still work, but will not conflict with WampServer over those 2 ports.

Close Skype (and WAMPServer, of course) and start them again. Skype and Wamp should be now working perfectly together. You can also restart your machine and try starting them again to make sure they’ll really work in the future.
Now that everything works fine, you’ll need to make a copy of the website and the database. This is a simple matter of copying the files from the web server (all of them from “httpdocs” or “public_html”) to WampServer’s WWW folder (which is inside the installation folder, default is C:/wamp; or you can left-click on the tray icon and click “www directory” to open it).

I think you know how to transfer files from the server to your computer, so I won’t describe it in detail. Copying the database is accomplished with phpMyAdmin (left-click on WAMP tray icon, then click “phpMyAdmin”), which you need to know how to use. It is quite easy, but is beyond the scope of this article and you’ll have to use Google to find some instructions (just search for “how to export and import databases with phpMyAdmin”).

So there, now you know the tools used by professional developers to test their work and you won’t have to wait 10 minutes and inconvenience your site visitors just to test a change in the code of your site or web application.