Moving a self-hosted WordPress blog to Dreamhost

WordPress was previously installed on Emperor, a six-year-old Linux system.  It was on the DSL line with https using a self signed certificate.  It worked but…

When I went to configure the subdomain ‘blog.netsnbytes.org’ Dreamhost complained that it was already in use by One-Click.  I don’t remember setting it up but maybe I did.  Oh well.  I blew it away and recreated it.

Each time I tried to use the One-Click install for WordPress this is the error I got visiting the page:

  • It doesn’t seem like I set up blog.netsnbytes.org correctly to run WordPress?
  • If it should, and the install was more than an hour ago, you may want to try deleting and re-installing the app
  • If you are a DreamHost Apps user, you can check the Discussion Forum or the wiki for further help
  • Paid DreamHost customers can submit a support ticket through the DreamHost Panel

sshing into the account it looked the directory was there, the WordPress files were there and the config file was correct.  I could ping the database and login to the database with the config file parameters.  I tried Firefox, Chrome and IE with the same result.

Frustrated I created a trouble ticket at DreamHost.  Within a few minutes a response came from Christopher.  He said he could access the site fine.  Now that didn’t make sense…or did it.

Running ‘ipconfig /flushdns‘ fixed the problem!  Stale DNS on my computer I suppose.

WordPress makes it so easy.  I went into Emperor (my Linux box) and did Manage > Export from Site Admin to save everything to an XML file.  On Dreamhost it was Tools > Import from the Dashboard.