Last Updated on June 13, 2019
If you’re like me, you started your website endeavors on a budget web-host just to get the hang of things before moving on to bigger and better things!
If you’re unlucky, like me, your starter web-host happened to be iPage, or some other crap web-host, with insane limitations and restrictions on all sorts of PHP and SQL/MySQL operations that aren’t listed openly on their website.
If you’re very unlucky, you’re still on your crappy web-host and are trying to restore a .sql backup via phpMyAdmin while being overly limited on the size of the backup you can upload. Well guess what.. chances are if they’re overly limiting your .sql upload size, they are limiting you on other important things as well!
Bummer, huh?
You’re probably seeing an upload limit like the one pictured above. So, like any smart person, you’ve looked into splitting your backup into multiple files to restore, but the SQL Dump File Splitter is either not working for your backup or you don’t even want to try it out of fear of messing something up.
BigDump Saves the Day by Automatically by Splitting your Database Import into Multiple Staggered Imports!
Now that you’ve found out about BigDump, you are 100% certain the day has been saved, right? Given how crappy your web-host is, prepare to have you dreams dashed!
You didn’t think your sub-par web-host was going to let you off the hook that easy did you? Ha, Never! The above image shows that the importing database user has exceeded an hourly max amount of queries.. What Now?
You could split your backup into multiple files and wait an hour between each import. Your web-host will surely tell you that they can lift/raise the limits placed on your PHP, or make the import for you, at a cost of course.
There is an Easy Way to get around the Low phpMyAdmin Upload Limit, and your Web-Hosts CRAZY low ‘max_questions’ limit!
Just make a few different users to your database, and each time you hit the max_questions limit using BigDump, just edit the BigDump.php script to use a fresh database user and then REFRESH the page where you hit the ‘max_questions’ error and the import should restart where it left off using the new database user added to BigDump.php! Repeat as needed until your import is complete. 😉
I’ve used the above method countless times on my old web-host and would have been screwed without it! I’ve contacted the creator of BigDump and asked him if he could add an optional feature to the script that will allow multiple database users to be used – hopefully he obliges. (Update: Since I’m the only person to ever ask him about adding a user-rotation to the script he has not done it, and probably will not unless more people request it!)
Let me know if you have any questions or if this post has helped you by leaving a comment below!
John started JSnowCreations as a place to post random tech guides and product reviews. However, while shopping for his daughter’s first “big girl” bed in 2019 he learned about the hidden dangers of fiberglass in mattresses. Since then, John has made it his mission to expose as much hidden fiberglass in mattresses as possible. His ultimate goal is federal regulations that ban fiberglass from being used in mattresses, or at least a law that require it to be listed in the material tags.