Migrate magento to new server / domain / database / host
 

Move or migrate magento to new server, domain, database, host, anything by following the steps below.

To configure your Magento with a new domain, you will need to do following steps:

- Copy whole Magento project from current server and paste it to the new server.
You can do server-to-server transfer. First, tar.gz your magento project
tar -cvf magento.tar.gz magento
Then copy it to your new server from old server
scp magento.tar.gz root@your.ip.address.here:/var/www/.

- Backup the database (Admin -> System -> Tools -> Backup)
You can also take backup through phpMyAdmin, or by mysql.
mysqldump -u user -p database > /path/to/keep/db.sql

- Logout from your old server. Login to new server.
Extract the file magento.tar.gz that you sent from old server
tar -zxvf magento.tar.gz

- Delete all directory or files that are there in cache folder
rm -rf var/cache/*

- Edit local.xml that is in magento/app/etc/local.xml and change mysql username, password, database as per new server credentials

- Import the backed up database. Before that create empty database to dump tables in it.
mysql -u root -p 'password';
create database dbname;
exit;
mysql -u root -p -d dbname < /path/to/your/db.sql

- Edit the database to change it to your new domain name. Search in core_config_data table for old domain.
select * from core_config_data where path like '%secure/base_url';
and update it with your new domain
update core_config_data set value='http://mysite.com/' where path like '%secure/base_url';