Best practices for movng a CMS site to a new host
I'd like some advice/feedback to enable me to move web content from one webhost to another.
I've built a site that uses PowerCMS (along with other WA tools, including CSS Menu and Site Sculptor). Now I learn that I have to move everything to another web host.
When I look at the instructions for PowerCMS, it states:
"After creating your first content area, you will be notified to upload your files to your live server before installing PowerCMS. Once you have uploaded all your files, you will want to run the PowerCMS Installation Wizard. To run the PowerCMS Installation Wizard, enter the URL to the page that you applied your first content area."
There's not anything I can find here or in other CMS tutorials/help that address the situation of moving a CMS-managed site to a new host.
My inclination would be to simply let Dreamweaver upload all the files (which would include the WA CMS stuff), but then I wonder about such things as:
* should I create a database there first and import the content from my existing CMS database? (And this is further complicated by the fact that my target host has very limited control over mySQL management; e.g., database user names cannot be edited, and, in fact, are forced to contain auto-generated numeric strings on creation, so even the initial name of a db user is out of my control.)
* should I NOT upload the connection files initially?
All help and suggestions appreciated!