To be honest I didn’t consider much before choosing DreamHost. I just sort of absorbed recommendations over the course of a couple years and ended up going with DreamHost because of the generous policies. I had also heard mostly good things about Pair.com, but I did talk to somebody who ran into trouble with their policies restricting some common uses of databases such as hit counting and referral tracking.

I hope the new site works to everybody’s satisfaction

Might not have noticed if you hadn’t mentioned it… except I just discovered activating “Enable live preview” has no effect while typing this comment.

If you don’t mind saying, which other hosting companies did you consider before choosing DreamHost? I’ve been looking for a low-cost provider and DH is high on my list since it seems especially service-generous compared with other providers in the same price range. And I’d be glad to use your referral code if I do sign up.

Moving the blog over was actually the easiest of all the transitions. As I alluded to in my post, I moved the database over ahead of time, so I could ensure a smooth transition. Doing this involved simply dumping the MySQL database from my old site and importing it into the new one. There was a little learning curve there but only a few hours.

One pitfall I ran into was the first dump had a mysterious corrupted line in it, which caused a parsing error when I attempted to import. It left the database in a half-valid state so I had to learn enough SQL to delete all the tables and start from scratch. I dumped again and reimported without incident. I found out later that I could have used a dump option that automatically adds “drop table” statements for all the tables, to allow easy overwriting of existing tables.

The question of compatible installs of WordPress was not an issue, because I just copied my entire WordPress directory over verbatim. Fortunately the MySQL and php installs were compatible enough to not raise any issues. I expect a lot of this is due to WordPress being so robust and so popular. Of course it works :) I do like about Dreamhost that while they offer convenient 1-click installs, I’m not limited to using them. So dropping my own WordPress directory in worked like a charm.

The only hangup in moving WordPress was that I underestimated the activity of commenters on the blog. While I was moving, 3 blog comments came in, so I had 3 comments in the old database that needed to get copied to the new one. I figured out enough about the WordPress database schema to realize I could drop them directly into the new database with old unique IDs that had been assigned to comments that were subsequently deleted as spam. That way I didn’t risk doing battle with the auto-increment mechanism, however that works in MySQL. (If you hover the cursor over the timestamp of this comment, you’ll see a URL ending in the comment’s unique ID).

Their web-control panel is truly AOK.

But I am curious: How hard was it to *move a blog* over? Did you export and import the entire DB and all that? Compatible installs of WordPress? Any glitches?

I’ve had negligable downtime, reliable stats and customer service, and, perhaps above all, affordability.

Glad to see you’ve successfully made the move.