Moving Moodle: Moving to an External Host

We eventually decided that we would use an external web host for our Moodle system. The monthly fee was a lot easier to raise that a the couple of grand we would need to kit ourselves out with a new server in-house. (Plus it was a lot less hassle for the IT guys).

Moving our Moodle system from the old Dell system in my office onto the external host was a lot simpler than cloning it onto the Dell system. I simply had to make a zip file of the Moodle software directory, a zip file of the Moodle data directory and dump the SQL database to a file on the Dell. I uploaded the three files to the new host (which is Linux based), unzipped the to zips and used the host's SSH access to restore the sql dump from the command line, which was detailed in their FAQs. All that was left to do was edit admin/config.php in the Moodle software folder to set the new hostname and database info.