Transferring websites to a new owner
After my post about flipping The Poker Blog Rory asked me to explain how to transfer a domain and files to the new owner. My goal when I sell a website is to get everything to the new owner within 48 hours. While that doesn’t always happen, I work hard for the first 48 hours hoping that it does. If it doesn’t work, I worked hard and 95% of the work is done; if it does work, awesome.
The Poker Blog is approaching that 48 hour mark and unfortunately it doesn’t look like I will get everything done. But I think I have worked as hard as I can.
Transferring the domain is something I usually do through GoDaddy, and that’s very easy since it is automatic on GoDaddy’s servers/computers/whatever. You simply login to your GoDaddy account, look at your domains, and pick the one you want to transfer. For The Poker Blog I am transferring the domain to a different registrar. It’s a bit more tedious and there are a few more security checks, so it takes longer, but all in all it’s about the same.
GoDaddy actually has a pretty good PDF guide for transferring domains to different registrars, but here is how it works:
1. The person who wants the domain makes a request at their own registrar for the domain to be moved to their account.
2. The registrar receives the request, tracks down the domain’s owner, and sends them the request along with a key or password.
3. The owner of the domain goes to the new registrar’s website and inputs the key, confirming that they do indeed wish to transfer the domain over to the new owner.
4. The new registrar contacts the old registrar to notify them of the request to transfer.
5. The old registrar confirms that they know the domain is being transferred.
6. The domain is given to the new owner.
Now there may be some more technical stuff going on, but that’s how it appears to work. I am not 100% sure, so I’ll update you once I get ThePokerBlog.net transferred.
Transferring domains is the easy part. Getting the files, databases, and everything else associated with the website to the new owner tends to be a little more time consuming. If you’ve ever had to switch webservers, you know the headaches that this can cause. The buyer, Andy, asked me to set everything up on his server. I usually charge a small fee to do this and Andy was happy to pay it and get his new website going.
The first thing I did was export the MySQL file from my server using PHPMyAdmin. It was saved on my desktop and I loaded it into my text editor so that I could delete the commands I didn’t need. When the file is exported it includes the commands to recreate the entire database - I didn’t need to create it since the WordPress install would do that. I just setup file so that it would input all my data into the new database.
There were some problems updating the database and some data was lost - it’s minor data and can be fixed, but it caused a bit of a headache. This can happen easily if you’re not careful. I was careful and I still lost data. Always make sure you have backups of anything you’re modifying.
After that I downloaded the theme I used. To install a theme in WordPress you just need to upload the whole directory, select the theme you want to use, and it instantly works. This part is very easy.
After that the website was working and everything seemed to be going fine. I’m still waiting for the domain to transfer, that will probably happen sometime in the next few days.
As long as you are prepared to transfer a website to a new owner it should be a pretty quick process. When I’m not installing everything for the buyer I usually make a zip file with everything they’ll need to get the website launched - including the FULL MySQL file, all files associated with the theme, and a short readme explaining everything I included.
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I had to recently move a wordpress blog over to another host. Something I did was make sure when I installed wordpress on the new host, the table names where the same (the wp_ prefix). I then exported the SQL, and dropped the tables from the new WP install, and recreated the tables from the exported SQL. Worked brilliantly!
The thing that has bitten me before was the default data wordpress has in the DB, and if you dont remove it, it can cause issues with keys etc.