A blog owner wants to free disk space in his shared hosting. In order to do that, he thinks to offload old media files to another external webserver (...instead of upgrading the hosting plan...). Note that he doesn't need to reuse those media files from the wordpress media library anymore. So, as long as the old blog posts keep showing the right pictures in public thumbnails and article pages he's satisfied. Also, he doesn't want to rely on external cloud services such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage or similar (otherwise I could easily do that with WP Offload plugins!).
So the idea is to:
- configure the webserver on a third level domain, like
old.myblog.ext - move all
wp-content/uploads/[old-years]/folders to old.myblog.ext - from MySQL, replace all occurences for
https://myblog.ext/wp-content/uploads/[old-years]/withhttps://old.myblog.ext/wp-content/uploads/[old-years]/(this is supposed to change all URLs for<img src="...">tag in the posts source code) - create a redirection rule for 404 errors from myblog.ext to old.myblog.ext (this is supposed to preserve search engines ranking)
This may be not a clean solution, but would it work? May step n. 3 cause any issue by accidentally affecting or breaking other website parts? Should I limit the query to wp_posts or extend it to other tables?
update wp_posts set post_content =
replace(post_content,'https://myblog.ext/wp-content/uploads/[old-years]/','https://old.myblog.ext/wp-content/uploads/[old-years]/');
What about featured images and thumbnails? Should GUID be included in the replace query?
