Prepare your files (Part 2 - Drupal site migration guide)

If your old host's control panel has file compressing features, you can easily compress your site's files and download them. Fortunately most control panels including cPanel, DirectAdmin and Plesk support this feature. In this article, I explain the same task in two methods. For those whose control panels can compress files or not. If your site is on a server without control panel, you can simply compress files using terminal.

First, log in to your Drupal site(not drupal.Org) as the administraor. Then, go to Adminiser > Site Configuration > Performance. (/admin/settings/performance)

You'll see a button to clear all cached data. Go ahead and clear the cache. If you have Boostmodule, Authcache module or similar caching modules enabled, go to each settings page for these modules and clear caches.(You can use Drupal tweaks module too)

Then, go to your host's web file manager. Our target is to prevent downloading unwanted files. So check /sites/all/modules, /sites/all/themes, /sites/all/libraries and other folders and check for compressed modules (that you forgotten to remove after installing the theme/module)
You can flush imagecache-processed images from your site. Go to administration page of imagecache. You can see the imagecache folder location.

If you have Backup and Migrate module activated, make sure that there are no files in manual or sheduled backups folders.
After this clean-up, you site is ready to shipping!
If your host support online file compressing, simply compress all the files(all files in public_html -- www, htdocs are same as publi_html) to a single file.
Then, move the compressed file to a folder where it can be accessed to the world. Then, simply type the FULL URL of the file.(eg: http://example.com/ship/pack.tar.gz -- not /home/foo/domains/example.Com/public_html/). (why ? You can download the file quickly. If you have an download accelerators enabled, it will start to hunt your file with a higher speed. Most hosts' control panels don't allow download accelerators to function inside the control panel due to security problems.)

After a successful download, delete the compressed file from your (old) server.

If your host doesn't support file compressing, you have to use a FTP client to download the files. Make sure that your Internet connection is not fragile!
Downloading files through FTP will take some time. So prepare a cup of tea and take it blaming at your old host (they had to add online compressing tools)

Okay. Now we have downloaded files (to your computer) from your old server. In next chapter, we are going to dump drupal site's database.