Learning via blood, sweat and tears

Just over a year ago, the webhosting company that had been servicing a number of my clients for many years sold out to a new company, Jumpline.com. Jumpline has proved to be one of the worst companies I have ever had to deal with in my career as a web designer. Several times clients were moved to new servers without notice, resulting in stores, forums and blogs being broken. Control panels were suddenly changed to Plesk, leaving customers stunned and scratching their heads. Many of the email accounts were not transferred properly, losing forwards, whitelists, etc., and some email boxes were not even turned on! Problems escalated and some became unsolvable because technical support was either non-caring or non-available. Mostly, Level 1 support did not have the expertise to help and for some reason was overly resistant to moving tickets to Level 2 until many long days had passed. The bottom line… it was time to move to a new host.

I did a lot of background research and settled on a new company. The point of this article is not to promote a webhosting company (I am not a reseller) but since I’ve already told you who the WORST webhost is I’ll just add… HOSTGATOR ROCKS!

In recent weeks I have moved 7 clients to new hosting, including 3 osCommerce stores, 2 Word-Press blogs and 2 Forums. One of the biggest challenges was moving from Plesk and PHP4 to cPanel and PHP5. I encountered many issues along the way, but between tech support going over the top to help me (did I mention Hostgator rocks!) and scouring forums for advice, all of the issues were resolved and life is good again.

Some of the solutions were easily found and some I had to do some serious digging for, so I decided to list some of the problems & solutions here to help others out and hopefully prevent a few gray hairs. I will also be adding some of these solutions (and more) to specific categories in my web design forum as soon as I can, but for now I’ll just focus on getting things up and running.

Reinstalling osCommerce and forums onto a new webhost running PHP5

Moving osCommerce and Forum files to a new webhost is no big deal, but moving a database from PHP4 to PHP5 and getting everything to run properly did prove challenging. On each site it seemed a different problem cropped up, but what was very helpful for me was learning the order in which things should be done.

My new host offered a one-click installation of the most current version of osCommerce, so my first thought was to run the install and let it create the database, upload our store files, and then import our SQL file using the backup restore within osCommerce. Saving you a little time here – that does not work! Here’s what you should do:

1. First you will need to make a backup copy of your database from your old host. Do not make a backup from within osCommerce using the backup tool, instead export the entire database to your hard drive via phpMyAdmin.

2. Next, upload the files from your old host to the new host via your preferred ftp program.

3. After the files have been uploaded, create a database on the new server. The following are the steps for cPanel:

- Click “MySQL databases”

- Under “Create New Database” give your database a name. Write down the name of your new database. Note: The name you select for the database is usually appended to your user name, i.e., username_databasename.

- Once the database has been created click “go back”. You will now need to create a user for the database.

- Scroll down the page to the MySQL Users section. Add the user name and password for the new user and click “create user”. Once the user has been created, click go back again.

- Now that the user is created, you need to assign permissions for the user to edit the database. Scroll down to the section “Add user to database” and choose the user & database name you just created.

- Next you will be taken to the permissions page. Click “all privileges” for the user and “make changes”.

4. The next step really depends on your new host and the level of support they provide. I found with Hostgator that it was best to upload the SQL file that you backed up from your old host to your server (into your public_html directory) and then ask tech support to import the database for you. They are more then happy to do so and seem to automatically problem-solve any issues that may occur.

If you have to import the database yourself, be careful to remove the section of the SQL that creates the database from the file before importing.

CREATE DATABASE `username_databasename` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci; USE `username_databasename`;

Since the database has already been created, you will receive an error unless that section is removed.

5. Once your database has been installed properly update your osCommerce configuration files located in the catalog/includes and admin/includes folders. You will need to update your https: path, your database name, database username and database password.

Hope this helps someone to get off on the right foot. I will be posting answers to more specific problems regarding broken SSL and missing forum pages to the Front Range Web Designers Forum in the near future.

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