Received an email from a new client of mine today that reads:
“Hi,
My name is Hal Werner. I’m a friend of Ryan Boots and he said you could probably help me out. If this sounds like something do-able in the given time frame, Ryan tells me the next step is go to your site at ashpointlane.com and buy an hour of time to start. Here are the particulars.
I have an existing non-Wordpress site at www.halwerner.com. I created a new version of my site within WordPress at the subdomain test.halwerner.com. I’d like to delete the existing site at www.halwerner.com and move my new WordPress site to the www.halwerner.com URL. I have a backup copy of the current www.halwerner.com site if anything goes awry. I’m hoping to get the move completed on or before Wednesday, 10/16/13 (I’m attending a conference starting 10/17).
Does that sound do-able? If so, just let me know and I can throw down for my first hour and start getting you the details you need.”
The first hour was pure exploratory research. Mr. Werner’s hosting was not configured to use the proper primary domain name, which was in fact expired. Every link in his hosting control panel pointed to the expired domain. I figured out a way to attach to his proper domain name and managed to make a MySQL dump of his new WordPress database.
I advised Mr. Werner at that point to contact his hosting provider to have them correct his hosting account setup.
After the hosting provider fixed his account I migrated Mr. Werner’s WordPress installation from his test subdirectory into root and changed the database to reflect the domain change. This was a very quickly executed support task.
