Here is my experience of moving your WordPress site from your local PC/desktop to your webhosting. I will be more specific and say this is mainly relates to GoDaddy hosting plans. I use WAMP locally, which has it’s own issues on setup (mainily due to some other applications using port 80 before your install or Apache already been installed for something else). But this post won’t go into setting up WAMP but into moving your site from the WAMP folder to the GoDaddy hosting site. There are a couple of key things to keeps in mind: 1. Write down every username and password and host server that you use as you may have do some things a number of times before you get your head around it. 2. (And this one got me a number of times) The password you use to log into your WordPress site (see image above) plays no part in the migration. What’s criticial for migration are the user names and passwords of the databases that are created on the hosting site. 3. Make backups of your files by whatever means that you available to you. Now I will say that I have tried to use WordPress guide to migrating sites many time (http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress) and I just found that some of it did not work for me. When you change the site and  home urls, you most likely will make your local site inoperable and myphadmin may not load, so that’s why it’s important that you took a backup – at least you can get it back! So here’s my method: 1. Back up your MySQL database – I use myphpadmin export option to save it to a .sql file. 2. Copy your wordpress .php files and database .sql file to your hosting use a ftp client or the GoDaddy file manager. You can save them to a backup folder first if you like. Most like you will copy them to the root (public html) folder of your hosting site. 3. Your GoDaddy hosting will come with a MySQL database but I like to create my own. When you create your own you will be asked to name it – and this will also be the name of the user name plus give the database a password. This is the most important password. 4. Log into your myphpadmin mySQL console and select the database you created. Grant user rights to the database. I have had issues in the past where the user account of the database does not have any permissions. There is a command: GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON databasename.* TO “wordpressusername”@”hostname”   IDENTIFIED BY “password”;  that needs to be run. I had some problems getting this to run in the SQL query window. Log a support case with GoGaddy if you have the same issues. 5.  Make sure that you can display a basic webpage on GoDaddy site. For example, try and browse  to http://yesthisworks.com/index.php where yesthisworks.com is the name of your domain and index.html is a simple html file saying “This works”. If you just updated your DNS at your domain name, you may need to wait until that propogates. Use MXToolBox or another to test that your domain name is directed to the GoDdaddy server. 6. Update the Home and SiteURL field values of the wp_options table to the name of your domain name eg. http://yesthisworks.com . I used MySQL console, connect to the database and run an sql query to find out the option ids of the home and siteurl in the wp_options table. then run an update statement to change the current value to current domain name eg. http://yesthisworks.com. 7. Edit the wp-config.php file with the database settings. The user name is the database username; the database will most like be the same as the username as these are the same field when setting up your database; the password is the database password and the server will be the GoDaddy server. For this look for the server name in myPHPadmin. It will be a long name with the databasename. That’s it. You should be able to get to the login page of your WordPress site at the address http://yesthisworks.com/wp-login.php I hope that works for you. I will attempt to modify this article as I use it next time and as I learn more and gain feedback from the wider community. Good Luck to all. Martin

Are you still tied to your ISP because of your email address? Most things in life increase in price. That is generally not the case for technology. It is almost impossible to keep pace with the change in technology and one thing is for sure, ISP (Internet Service Provider) plans get cheaper over time. The ISPs will constantly review their pans as prices fall at the wholesale level and outdated technology get replaced with something new and faster. In most cases, most ISPs will not automatically move you to better plans – you need to speak to them about what is available. Customers will generally be on a 12 or 24 month contract and be using the ISPs email address, which they’ll gladly give free to you knowing that changing it will be difficult and time consuming decision. Kozma Technology recommends all business have a domain name based email address so that they are not tied to their ISP and are able to review their charges as contract as up for renewal. A domain based email address looks more professional and is available after purchasing a domain name and attaching it to a hosting service. Office 365 is a great scalable solution for small business who want a domain name based email and be able to get delivery of that email on a PC/laptop, most browsers and most smart phones. Once you have your email setup, you are able to change your ISP when contracts expire without impact on email addresses. Here is a link to an Australian comparison guide of ISPs in this country: http://broadbandguide.com.au For information on domain names, Office 365 domain based email addresses or other features, contact info@kozmatech.com or fill in the contact information in the sidebar. Martin