I had a Freshworkshops student taking the Build Your Own WordPress Website workshop ask for help to change her WordPress site over to a new domain. She had registered with a .com but wanted to change it to a .com.au as she was in Australia.
I recommend all students setup their hosting at Rochenhost as a WordPress hosting company because of their twice daily backups of customer files and databases, certified Red Hat support folks, amazingly fast response time (usually under 12 minutes) and the cost of their hosting packages are similiar to all those “other” companies like Bluehost, HostGator, GoDaddy, MediaTemple and so on.
In order to do this, we completed the following steps using the remote training & support service I offer at Freshworkshops:
- Signed into cheapdomains.com.au and changed the “www” and “@” record to point to her shared ip address at Rochenhost
- Told Rochenhost we wanted to change the primary domain name to the new .com.au
- Connected via FTP to her WordPress site before these changes had taken effect and changed the “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Site Address (URL)” in the wp-config.php file
- Ran a script against the database to change all instances of her old domain to her new domain. This mysql replace script from IDoWebDesign will generate the SQL statement for you.
After that last item, I told the student her site would not resolve until the first two were complete. We tested to see if the new domain was resolving to the hosting space at Rochenhost by going to OpenDNS’s Cache Check and typing in the new domain and comparing that against the shared IP address she noted for her hosting space at Rochenhost.
After completing this, I showed her how to ping the domain in the command prompt and if the DNS was stale on her computer (which it was) how to release and renew her DNS using “ipconfig /flushdns” from the Windows command prompt. If that didn’t work, we would have power cycled her cable modem and pinged the new domain again.
We pulled up her site, she was able to login to WordPress under the new domain and was very happy!
The End *smile*
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