Setting up your old Drupal 6 site on a new server

When moving your site from one server to another the process can be quite tedious and ultra confusing. In this post we hope to make transferring your Drupal based website ultra easy. Let me preface this entire post with the official statement from Drupal on how to properly transfer your site to a new host. Hopefully you’ll be able to follow their instructions as they would mimic ours 100%. This post is pretty specific in the fact that you may not have access to the old server or database and you might only have your site files and database backed up on your desktop. In this case, follow our guide if the Drupal Official one will not work because you can’t complete some steps. 1.

1. Step One: Upload your site files to the root directory of your account. On our servers this would be your “public_html” folder.
2. Step Two: Create a new database and import your old database into it.
3. Step Three: Change the “clean_url” field to ‘s:1:”0″;’ in the variables table.
4. Step Four: Empty the “Cache” tables in your database.
5. Step Five: Go to http://yoursite.com/?q=admin/settings/clean-urls in drupal 5/6 and http://yoursite.com/?q=admin/config/search/clean-urls in Drupal 7.
6. Step Six: Log in with your old admin username and password
7. Step Seven: Disable the clean URLs.
8. Step Eight: Run the Cron to check for updates
9. Step Nine: If there are updates do them and re-enable Clean URLs when you’re done.
10. Step Ten: Hold on you should be done!

If you notice things link images that aren’t showing up or links that don’t quite work, you’ll have to do some homework and get them back online. This is because each server has it’s own settings so if your old server was set up differently than your new one, you might run into problems. In this case either contact your new host or contact us, we’d be happy to help.   If this article helped you move your site, we’d like to know. Leave a comment below.