Wordpress How To Pro

Do you upgrade your WordPress installations? How does it turn out for you? Have you ever have a disaster?

Ok, so here is my disaster story of the week. I have this wordpress site that I wanted to shift from one host to another. Easy enough, I have done it before and didn’t have any problems.

The site is an older installation, 2.6, so the first job is to upgrade it. Usually I upload the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin and use this to upgrade older installations. (Automatic upgrading is now inbuilt with WordPress 2.7 and above).

Anyway I was feeling particularly lazy this day and decided to save some time and just upgrade through the WordPress section in the cpanel. Easy as clicking a link. Of course it warns you to back up your files, you know, just in case. But guess what? I didn’t worry because I have never had a problem before. I should know better.

So I click the upgrade link and it goes through it process. When it says its finished I head on over to have a look at the site, and guess what I see?

A blank white page! Nothing there. Great

Ok, I think, it’s not so bad, I am shifting the site anyway so maybe I can salvage it. So I download the MySQL database and all of the website files. I then change the dns for domain name to point at the new hosting. So, now I have to wait for the dns to change.

I go about some other business while waiting. 24 hrs later I am ready to set up the blog on the new hosting and I go through the process, hoping that the site will be ok but kind of knowing in my gut that the  problem will still be there when it is all done, and sure enough it is. I still get the white, blank page.

So from here I have to delete all of the files and start with a clean install of WordPress. Which means that I have to install the theme and all of the plugins again. But what about all of the posts? This blog has been live since September 2008 and had quite a few posts.

What to do? I didn’t just want to start from the beginning so I went looking for the old posts. I did a cache:mydomain.com search on google and there they were. So it was just matter of spending some time re-populating the blog. Several hours in fact. What a drag.

Anyway, the moral of my disaster story is backup, backup, and backup some more. Backup everything you do, whether it is your sites or your hard drive, just backup. This is a lesson learned the hard way.

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