Databases questions

In DirectAdmin open Account Manager › then MySQL Management and create the database along with a user, then note the database name, username and password. Your application needs all three plus the host, which is localhost.

Use phpMyAdmin: create an empty database first, open it, then use the Import tab to upload your .sql file. If the file is too big to upload, compress it as .gz or split it.

Open the database in phpMyAdmin and use the Export tab — the quick method produces a .sql file you can download and keep. Do this before any upgrade or migration.

phpMyAdmin is a web interface for looking inside your MySQL databases — browsing tables, running queries, importing and exporting. It is included with your hosting and opens from Extra Features › then phpMyAdmin in DirectAdmin.

Your site’s configuration file has the wrong database name, username, password or host. Check all four against what DirectAdmin shows, remembering the account prefix on the database name, and use localhost as the host.

MySQL is the database that stores everything your site does not keep in files — posts, pages, users, settings, orders. WordPress and most other applications keep their content there, which is why a backup of your files alone is not a complete backup.

MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL created by its original developers. For anything you will run on shared hosting they behave identically, and software written for MySQL works on MariaDB without changes.

Change it for the database user in Account Manager › then MySQL Management, then immediately update the same password in your application’s configuration file — wp-config.php for WordPress. The site goes down the moment the two stop matching.

Upload it compressed as a .gz or .zip, which phpMyAdmin can import directly and which is often enough on its own. If it still fails, split the file into several smaller ones and import them in order.

The database username or password is wrong, or that user has no rights on that database. Check all three against DirectAdmin, remembering that database and usernames carry your account prefix — a missing prefix is the single most common cause.