Limited resources and controlling costs is becoming a bigger issue for businesses including web designers. As I’ve developed a great deal of websites over the past couple of months, I’ve been running into the problem of a limited amount of MySQL Databases as part ofmy hosting deal from BlueHost.
It’s the price to pay for having such an incredible host, and hopefully in the future I can get into a formal review of it.
But for now, I want to go over the steps for connecting one or more Wordpress Blogs to a Single MySQL Database.
There are several different ways to install WordPress, but seeing that the vast majority of hosts use One-Click installation processes, I’ll assume that you have already installed one Blog.
- Open up the WP-Config.php file on your server.
- Write down the different MySQL Settings, i.e. DB_NAME, DB_USER, etc. Also, scroll a bit down and make note of the $table_prefix name.
- Install your second WordPress Blog.
* Thankfully Bluehost uses SimpleScripts to install WordPress Blogs automatically. The second step of the installation process through SimpleScripts allows you to unselect “Automatically create a new database” and manually enter the information that you copied from WP-Config.php of the first blog.
** If you are using SimpleScripts to install your second site, make sure that you give the Table Prefix of your second blog a different name than the Table Prefix of the first blog. - If you manually install your blog, edit the WP-Config.php file of your second site and manually change the settings. Again, put in the same DB_NAME, DB_USER, etc., and a different $table_prefix.
And that’s all there is to it. To my understanding the amount of tables that a single MySQL database can hold is infinite.
