Anyway

The mov­ing went rel­at­ively pain­lessly, although I should really have waited until the DNS move had taken effect before killing my DYNDNS account, since that meant the site was out of com­mis­sion for a little longer than abso­lutely neces­sary. Mind you, that was prob­ably all of two hours, so not a big deal. Everything should now work again as before.

The quick ver­sion of the steps I took to move Any­way:

1. copy all the Word­Press files and rel­ev­ant plu­gin files to the new ISP site
2. clean up the MySQL data­base as much as pos­sible to cut down on size; mostly delet­ing SpamKarma logs and old com­ment spam
3. deac­tiv­ate all the plu­gins except the spam fighter
4. export the MySQL data­base to SQL state­ments (I use phpmy­ad­min for this)
5. import the MySQL data­base to the MySQL data­base set up on the new ISP
6. make sure the config.php file has the right con­fig­ur­a­tion settings
7. noti­fy the domain regis­trar of the new DNS settings
8. delete the rel­ev­ant part of the dyndns account (that could have been done later)
9. wait
10. once host laurenwood.org shows the new DNS has taken effect, run the Word­Press upgrade script
11. turn on the oth­er plugins
12. run xenu to check for any broken links

My web site does seem faster now, and my web surf­ing is no longer com­pet­ing with the spam com­ments for band­width, so I’d say it’s a win all around.