[Resolved] Moving a Generatepress Website to new Server

[Charles]

Hello,

Big objective I have a Windows 2012 server with 50 Generatepress WordPress websites on it.
I want to move the sites to a new Ubuntu server.
I have used a variety of plugins which have worked but with some issues (they seem to work once and then 2nd website fail.)
I have also tried manually moving a site.
The manually moved site https://ahs2test.miraquel.uk/ I can view the home page but when I go to

https://ahs2test.miraquel.uk/wp-login.php and login

I do not get to see the dashboard but instead there are 4 links to

Wordpress.org
Documentation
Support
Feedback

https://ahs2test.miraquel.uk/sample-page/ – comes up with a 404 error.

I can see the https://ahs2test.miraquel.uk/sample-page/ page in the database

I have edited the Options table in the Database to the site url

https://ahs2test.miraquel.uk/wp-admin/index.php

When I go to this page this is the error message Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page. (I am the site admin!)

Any suggestions as to what will allow the WordPress Dashboard to become visible most welcome.

Many thanks

Charles

[Ying]

Hi Charles,

If you’ve already moved the sites to your new host, you can always log in to the WP sites from the host dashboard.

I would suggest contacting your host about this and letting them check if your WP install is correct.

[Charles]

Hi,
The problem – after manually moving the files from my Windows 2012 server to a new Ubuntu 2022 server when I logged in to the website – the login worked but I could not access the WordPress Dashboard.
Nor could I access anything other than the home page.
Adding the .htaccess file fixed that but not the login.
It was suggested I try the options in this article.
https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/sorry-you-are-not-allowed-to-access-this-page-error-in-wordpress/
For me the 3rd option worked.
I have a Plesk control panel so I went to
File Manager and drilled down in to

wp-content > themes and changed the name of the generatepress theme to xx-generatepress

I then went to login for the site and I could not only log in but I could get to the dashboard.
I can now edit the site etc.
I then logged out, changed the theme folder xx-generatepress back to generatepress and I can now log in again.
Early days I have only been able to do this for a few minutes but this seems to have fixed my problem.

I suspect I could skip the .htaccess bit if I went to Permalinks and just saved that again – but I will experiment with that another day.

[Ying]

Thank you for sharing your experience here, I’m sure it will be helpful for other users 🙂

[Charles]

A couple of weeks on I now know that the solution I proposed whilst it worked was less than optimal. Ironically asking your ISP to fix a problem sounds good but my ISP is the largest based in the UK and they did not know how to fix the problem. The solution they came up with did not seem “right”, it did work, but it did make me realise what the problem was for me and therefore how to fix it. These notes are not perfect but I doubt I will find time in the next few months to improve them. Hopefully with the screen shot this will help anyone wanting to move a website from a Microsoft 2012 Windows Server to the Ubuntu platform. In October 2013 Microsoft plans to stop supporting Windows 2012 Servers.

My Steps

Steps for moving a WordPress Website from my 2012 server to Ubuntu
1. Create the destination on the Ubuntu server that should be the domain name. Obviously the domain will not resolve but the Bournville Laptop* can be configured with the hosts file to view the upload. And the FTP upload.
2. 2012 Create the FTP settings to download the wp-content file and Database.
3. Download the WP-content folder to speed this up make it in to a .7z file format 100MB took 20 seconds. This is important.
4. Unzipped that took maybe half an hour.
5. When on my laptop I was able to then unzip the wp-content.7z file and then I can re-zip that and upload the folders as .zip to the folder wp-content on the server.
6. On the Ubuntu server create a destination to upload to and make that a WordPress website.
7. Delete the content in the wp-content folder
8. Then FTP the .zip files to the folder wp-content
9. Unzip with the Archive > Extract Files option.
10. Delete the .zip files tick all the boxes and click Remove.
11. At phpMyAdmin go in to the new database and at the bottom of the table list tick the Check All box and then go to the With Selected on the right and select Drop option.
12. That deletes the existing tables and then you can upload the database from the 2012 server.
13. Next job go to the wp-config.php files and open that by clicking on it.
14. Whilst in the database one needs to go to owl3lvs_options and edit and change the first two lines to match the URL which the site has been moved and click Go to save
15. Then go to the usermeta table and click on that. When moving from 2012 to Ubuntu the casing which works in 2012 does not work in Ubuntu and one has to go to the meta_key column and click on that – this unhides some lines and then go and Edit those lines to make the table prefix all lowercase.
16. Navigate down to the table prefix and change this so it matches the table prefix in the database do not overlook the underscore
17. $table_prefix = ‘owl3lvs_’;
18. With the above done login with the same user name and password as the site had on the previous server and url.
19. Fingers crossed you should be in.
20. Not finished yet go to Settings and click on Permalinks and click Save
21. Now you should be able to edit the website and view all the pages.
22. Check one can login on the hosts laptop and then go to the DNS settings and change those.
23. The last bit will be to make the website https but that cannot happen until the DNS switches over
24. Once the site is https make sure the email is configured to be a genuine email address and that is all green in the security settings.
25. Job finished.
end

Things you will need to know – how to edit the hosts file. * That is on my Bournville laptop.
FTP from one place to another
Zip a file to speed the whole process up.
I was using Plesk as my control panel

[Ying]

Thank you so much for sharing the detailed information!

Glad it’s all good now 🙂

[Author]

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