Moving PhpBB to a new host

This fast speed tutorial shows you the process of installing your existing Phpbb forum onto a new webhost.

Written version:

Let’s begin migrating our Phpbb forum, by logging into the current forum in order to backup the database. On a small forum we can take the database easily with the built in database backup feature.

After we have downloaded the backup, we can open up our ftp-program and download all the phpbb files from our old server. This will take a while so let’s just skip to where all the files have finished downloading.

Now we’ll login to our new host which in this case is hostgator. Here we’ll begin by adding the domain of our forum as a new addon domain. This is because we are already hosting other domains on this account as well.

Now that we have created the addon domain slot, we can login to our hostgator ftp-account and upload our freshly downloaded phpbb files into the folder of our domain.

This will take some time too, so let’s go do some database stuff in the meanwhile. In the c-panel of Hostgator, we’re going to select My SQL databases. First we’ll create a brand new database for our forum. Notice how the prefix of our database name is reporter. That’s just our username for cPanel, and many hosts automatically put the username in front of the database name, especially in shared hosting accounts.

Now we’ll create a new user. Then we’ll assign that user to the database we just created. Here we have to assign the permissions for the user. We’re going to simply give it all possible priviledges.

Now we are ready to import our old database into this new one. Let’s use php my admin for that. Here we simply select the correct database and the go to the import tab. Now we can upload the database that we backed up in the very beginning of this video. Make sure the encoding is set to utf-8.

Now we have to wait for our ftp-upload to finnish. After that, we will edit the config dot php file by downloading it to our computer and opening it in a plain text editor like notepad. We need to edit the file to reflect our new database name, username and password. These are the ones we just created. When done, save the file and upload it back.

Let’s check if our forum is now working on the new server. Many hosts allow you to use a temporary url that consists of your shared account ip-address, your username and the name of the addon domain. This is a great way to verify that everything is working before we redirect the traffic to our new host.

Our forum seems to be working, so now all that is left is pointing the name servers of the domain name to direct the traffic to our new server. We’ll do this at Godaddy, because that’s where our domain is registered. You need to check the nameservers of your new hosting service, and replace the old nameservers with the new ones. You can usually find this information at the left side of your c-panel.

The name servers might take a few hours to update but after that the forum is loaded from your new server. You can now delete the installation from your old server.

Thanks for watching and see you next time on fastertutorials.com