Migrating my Drupal site to a new host

Of course you need to upload Drupal and all you modules, your theme and your uploaded files.

You don't need to install Drupal, because "installing" essentially means creating the database tables, and you already have yours in your backup. Just create a new utf8 database and a user with the needed privileges for it, and load your database backup.

The order of uploading the files and loading the database doesn't matter, because they are two separate procedures, until you bring them together by entering your database connection information in Drupal's settings.php file, in the $db_url = line. Also, it never hurts to run update.php at the end, because (in Drupal 6) it does some cleanup.

Although there are always little surprises in a new host, don't worry as long as you have a good database backup and your files, and people to ask questions.

PHP "safe mode" is always bad, so disable it if you can. It causes all kinds of problems with uploads. By the way, it has been removed from the upcoming PHP6 (see http://php.net/features.safe-mode)

> my old host does not support LDAP and I need that for my site

May I ask what you're using LDAP for and what do you mean that your new host 'supports it'?

I'm doing a school site where students don't all have email addresses (and shouldn't have to supply one anyway). One of my biggest, most difficult problems to overcome before the site is able to go live is that drupal insists that every user has a unique email address. On top of that, all the drupal 'communication features' simply assume that the user has supplied a working email.

So I looked at LDAP as a potential solution (authenticating from a pre-created list of pupils and passwords), but concluded that webhosts simply don't support running LDAP servers. Which MediaTemple account-type supports it? Do you have to install your own LDAP server, or is there one already available?

Thanks.

> I'm actually really nervous about doing this.

Don't be. As long as you have the site remaining on the old space with the old database, then you can always get back to where you are now. You could literally do the migration wrongly ten times before getting it right - so you don't have to do it correctly the first time, and it's highly unlikely that you can do anything which breaks your new account beyond repair or a simple reset by the host.