A little background:
I run a forum for automobile enthusistast in Maryland.
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Shared Premium Hosting account w/ PHP/Perl w/ GoDaddy (yea yea, there's your problem, blah blah, I know)

Starting December 27, 2007, the forums, at various times, have been extremely slow. On that day the server load average hit 34.79 24.60 20.74 with 8 Users Online. I realize that those averages show the entire server, not just my site. Since that day, the load averages have hit 12.xx at various times. It will take 10-12 seconds (or sometimes longer) for the AdminCP to load or to do a "New Posts" search. About the same time to read a thread. Then again, sometimes the forum will be perfectly fine. However, even when the forums slow to a crawl, the averages may only be 2.x I have contacted GoDaddy and they say "everything" is as normal. I contacted them the other night, and they asked me to do a Trace Route to my site and send the results to them. I did it just to appease them. Well, the traceroute is going to mdstreetscene.com (the html site). The database is on http://mysql47.secureserver.net/ So I don't quite know how that is going to help them diagnose the problem. They probably just want to say that it's on my end with too many hops or something.

Anyway, I want to stop using GoDaddy for the database/forum part. They are alright for file hosting (I have 200GB of storage w/ 2TB of bandwidth. And my download speeds are ~750kb/s)

I have acquired a Virtual Server with Windows Administrator access. (I can install whatever program I want/need) I am running Apache w/ MySQL, PHP, etc. I want to upload/put my 400mb database on this server. I don't quite know how to do it. What file type should I be uploading and where? Using what program? I assume I would have to copy the actual vBulletin forum files to the new server too? That's fine, it'll take awhile, but it's doable.

Is there a way I can use a brand new vBulletin forum installation (which I currently have on this virtual server), and just add my database info such as users, posts, threads, and PM's? This way I kind of have a fresh start and I can build it up.

I know this may be a lot to ask, but thanks for any help you can give.

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-Jason
www.mdstreetscene.com
Maryland Automobile Enthusiast Community
www.jayunsplanet.com
My personal site just for fun

Sure, just back up the DB and import it via SSH onto the new server.

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Yup, SSH is the way to go!

To download the database onto your new server, you can use wget.

wget http://yourdomain.com/mysqldatabase.sql (make sure to delete once done!)

Then in your control panel, create a database and a username. Then just use the following:

mysql -u username -p databasename < databasefile.sql

It will ask for your password.

Using SSH will be the quickest method of transferring the database from one server to another and then restoring it. You can also use SCP to transfer all of your files (html, php etc) over SSH from one place to another. SCP is helpful when your ISP's provided upload limit is capped and you don't want to download and re-upload via FTP.

Using SCP allows you to transfer using your upstream's (server providers) bandwidth connection, which is a plus.

If you have any questions or need help moving the database, feel free to PM me.

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If you are unfamiliar with ssh I recommend having your host or someone you know do it for you

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I sent over a detailed guide, I'm hoping that helps. If you have any questions, let me know and I'll be more than happy to help.

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- AirborneFive - Simplified Web Hosting
- First Month is 100% Free - 60 Day Money Back Guarantee
- 99.99% Network & Server Uptime Guarantee

Where user_name is the MySQL username, db_name is the MySQL database name and backup.sql is the location of your backup file.

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