Changing DNS

Hopefully someone can help me with this....

I have an old website and domain with one company but would like to host the site on my hostgator account where the rest of my sites are. Do I simply change the DNS Servers, add the domain, and then upload the files and database? Is it that easy? Will I have to go back to the old host and delete the files? The site I am moving is pretty important to me so I don't want to mess this up. It is a wordpress site and I have it fully backed up.

Thanks for any help.

Yup, change nameservers with your hostgator nameservers and then add domain to your cpanel simple as that.

You've got it but I would suggest changing the order a little bit.

1) Copy the site from the old host to the new one - do NOT delete it from the old host yet
2) Make sure it's working - if you can. In most cases, you can get to the site with an IP or a variation of it.
3) Once you are relatively sure it's working, THEN go to your registrar and change the DNS to the new host settings.
4) Within 5 minutes you should be pointing to the new location via DNS... but you might have to do this in a CMD window:
ipconfig /flushdns
5) wait about 24 hours to ensure that all of your visitors have time for their dns to update
6) delete the old site

Easy as can be... done it many times. The only time it can be a bit harder is when it's a dynamic site with near constant updates... cause then you're going to lose any new data once you've created the backup and started the move.

Just a note, I also put in the server IP, for me it worked.

LOCKS said:

Just a note, I also put in the server IP, for me it worked.

Click to expand...

That's not weird, that's how WP works. You need to run a completely new WP for each domain you are running it on. There is an addon or something somewhere where you can run multiple instances it from one installation, but even if it did that, you still need to install the new domain because it uses a new SQL database for each instance.

*Edit* strange because I thought I was responded to a post where it said that someone had moved their host where word press was already installed and had to reinstall wordpress before it would work for the new domain... but now that post isn't there...