I'm very proud of myself today. I'm in NO way a PHP programmer, I've just been a Joomla user since before Joomla was Joomla and have never been afraid to jump in and beat it to submission whenever I've had an idea. Sometimes, extension developers will solve your crisis for you. Other times, you have to dig in and create your own solutions.

Yesterday, I was customizing one of my sites and working on getting JomSocial looking pretty. It's often a case of viewing the source to see what IDs and classes are involved and then going into Dreamweaver and using the 'find and replace' function to find every instance of a CSS call. It can be crazy, but I'm stubborn about getting what I want.

Since I recently did this for a client, I thought I'd create a quick (well, maybe not so quick) and easy (ok, not so easy either) tutorial on how you can backup your Joomla site and move it to a new web host.

Since Joomla is made up mostly of files and folders with a MySQL database, we'll want to backup both.  The best way to start is to create a backup folder on your PC and then:

1. Using FTP, copy your Joomla site's configuration.php file over into your backup folder.

For this article, I'm going to assume you've managed to get Joomla installed on your website host and now you're looking around in the back end and unsure what to do next.