Sometimes you may want to migrate your Joomla site from one webhost to another. Or you may want to make a copy or clone of your site to another directory for debugging.

1. Backup your existing site (database and files).

2. Create the new database in the new host.

3. Copy all the Joomla files from old host to the new host. You can tarball the large file set for more convenient download and upload.

4. In the new host, you have to edit the configuration setting values found in the configuration.php file (that is in the root of the file set). You may need to change the file permission to 777 in order to edit it. But make sure to change it back to permission 444 afterwards. change the server paths found in configuration.php. The variables $db, $user, and $password are the database name, database user, and database password respectively.

5. In the configuration.php file, you will also need to edit the server paths in the variables $log_path, $tmp_path, and $sendmail to match the path of your new server.

6. Usually, only the paths in the configuration.php file needs to be changed. But you may want to search through the whole file set to see if there are any hard-coded paths to the old server that may need to be changed.

7. When done editing the configuration file, remember to change the permission of configuration.php in new host back to 444 for security reasons to make it more difficult for hackers to edit your configurations.

8. In the old host, delete the records in the jos_session table.

9. Export the old host database. You may want to search through the sql file to see if there are any instances to the old host path in any of the database records (perhaps installed there by extensions, etc). But usually there isn't.

10. Import the database file into the database of the new host.

11. Test new site.

(This tutorial refers to Joomla version 1.5.14)