Mark, unfortunately I can't in good faith suggest anyone move any hosting to Godaddy. I love their domain services and DNS, but have heard nothing but bad things about their hosting.

As for moving a SQL database however, you typically will do a backup and a restore of that backup onto the new servers.

*this is all my personal opinion and doesn't necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer*

---

Chris Hammond
Former DNN Corp Employee, MVP, Core Team Member, Trustee
Christoc.com Software Solutions DotNetNuke Module Development, Upgrades and consulting.
dnnCHAT.com a chat room for DotNetNuke discussions

A month or so ago, I was hired to migrate and upgrade a DNN 4.9.0 site from WH4L to GoDaddy. Not having any personal experience with their Windows web hosting but aware of some of the issues with GoDaddy hosting I reluctantly agreed to give it a try.

The most difficult issue was that GoDaddy does not permit restoration of a database backup that was not first created on the same database using the hosting control panel. Instead, they do permit remote access to your hosting accounts SQL database(s) via SQL Server Management Studio, etc. and expose the Database Publishing Service webservice to support the Database Publishing Wizard (now a part of the SQL Server Management Studio, not a separate client).

In case you have not found the following in GoDaddy's help system, here is an article link which sort of explains the process:

http://community.godaddy.com/help/art...

Here are a few issues which I ran into while publishing the database:

1. If you have used GoDaddy's one-click installation of DotNetNuke (as did my client before I became involved in the migration), the SQL Server database which is created does not allow remote connections and cannot be modified to later allow remote connections. I ended up deleting the database and creating a new one with the option "Allow remote/direct database access" checked. Apparently setting that option requires manual intervention by GoDaddy support as the new database was not created and setup for remote access for about 12 hours after I created it using the hosting control panel.
2. The Microsoft Database Publishing Wizard client referenced in the above article is no-longer supported by Microsoft and will not work with SQL Server 2008 databases (which was the version of the one I was migrating). Instead, SQL Server Management Studio 2008 includes a "Generate and Publish Scripts" task (right click over the name of the database to be migrated in the Object Explorer and select Tasks-->Generate Scripts. Follow the steps of the scripting wizard with these notes:
   1. Do not script all objects - uncheck Users and Roles
   2. Select Publish to Webservice and create a new publishing provider with your GoDaddy account and database information. Note in particular:
      1. Webservice Authentication must use credentials of the PRIMARY FTP account setup by GoDaddy. It will not authenticate using the credentials of a FTP account which you have added yourself.
      2. Use the web service address, host name, database name provided in your GoDaddy SQL Server Database information screen. Hard to find but it's there and accessible from your hosting control panel.
   3. After I was finally able to connect to the webservice and began publishing the database (be patient, its a very slow process), it took about 8 attempts because of database integrity violations in the database being migrated. For example if a stored procedure had not been properly removed by a prior module uninstall and it referred to a non-existing table or table column, the database publishing would stop showing an error not in the invalid stored procedure but the one prior in the publishing order. Each time I would have to hunt down the problem database object, delete or remove it from the publishing list, and start over. Fortunately, no changes are made to the remote database during this pre-publishing scripting.

Hope this helps - feel free to ask any questions and I'll try to recall the answers. Just don't ask me to do a migration to GoDaddy for you!

---

Bill, WESNet Designs
Team Lead - DotNetNuke Gallery Module Project (Not Actively Being Developed)
Extensions Forge Projects . . .
Current: UserExport, ContentDeJour, ePrayer, DNN NewsTicker, By Invitation
Coming Soon: FRBO-For Rent By Owner