WordPress Content Management System Icon

Migrating Site to GoDaddy Basic Managed WordPress

, , , , , , ,

Recently was not able to convince a client of the benefits of having me professionally manage, host and maintain their website for them. They wanted to save money and use GoDaddy’s Basic Managed WordPress service. So I had to migrate their completed demo over to it but ran into countless errors with GoDaddy’s hosting platform.

The GoDaddy migration tool was useless as was GoDaddy support. GoDaddy support insisted that I upgrade the server in order to complete the migration. But I only had delegated access to the clients account with no ability to purchase said upgrade because the client did not grant me those permissions.

Long story short, I was able to manually migrate their site over, even though we were on the Basic Managed WordPress server using the steps enumerated in this article.

This article is only for my personal use, to help jog my memory if another client want to migrate their site to a more affordable solution. Please do not use this article for migrating any of your or client sites. If you do, you take full responsibility for anything that goes wrong, or right for that matter.

 

Read more

XAMPP Logo

Install XAMPP for WordPress Development

, , , , , , , ,

Recently needed to implement a local development environment that used Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows.

Years ago I played with WAMP server, which worked well. But the payload was large (1GB installer), system resource utilization high, and it required a number of outdated Microsoft Visual C++ versions to be installed in order to operate correctly. It was also very slow to use but it did work.

Local by Flywheel was slightly better but also very, very slow on a Windows computer. At least in my experience.

By far the best experience has been XAMPP. Granted, you have to run the installer as an administrator as well as its primary executables. But beyond that, it had a smaller installer and opening up a local WordPress installation is at least 4x faster than with Local by Flywheel. In short, for my personal needs the clear winner is XAMPP. Your experience may be different.

Within this article I have instructions and a video covering how I installed XAMPP on my Windows PC for quickly spinning up a WordPress installation for use in WordPress Plugin development.

 

Read more

Apache Logo

Restrict Server Access by IP using Apache .htaccess

, , , , ,

There may be some situations when you want to restrict or redirect your website traffic by IP address. To accomplish this simply add the following lines of code to your website’s .htaccess file (assuming your website is on an Apache webserver):

 

Read more

BlueHost Logo

Find .htaccess within BlueHost cPanel File Manager

, , , ,

We were recently contracted by a new client to “fix their website” which suddenly went offline.

Our analysis revealed that they had an improperly configured Apache .htaccess file. This can happen if the hosting company migrates a website or updates the .htaccess file, which they do from time to time, but without testing for compatibility. This can also happen for a number of other reasons but you aren’t here for those.

The client authorized us access to their BlueHost hosting account so that we could resolve the issue for them. It was at that time that we discovered that their .htaccess file was not visible from within the File Manager component window under their cPanel.

Usually one would just check the box to “show hidden files” under the options menu which would reveal the .htaccess file. In this case there was no such option.

It was then that we discovered a work around which would force the reveal of any hidden files from within the File Manager component window. We will share this tip with you below.

 

Read more