Well I just transferred this blog(creationspire.com) to a different webhost – Hostgator.

What I wanted to do was to move the blog to different webhost, but maintain the domain and domain structure.

It was not a one-run-transfer, though. I manually did some fixes.

What I did was first was copied the entire blog folder to my local computer, just in case.

Then while on the old blog:

1 – I navigated to Manage>Export, and exported the comments, pages, custom fields, categories, and tags.

2 - It created an xml file which I was to import in the new blog

On the new host:

1 -  I  added a new Addon Domain, which is creationspire.com, inside cpanel.

2 – I then created a new WordPress installation via Fantastico using the same domain structure.

I encountered an error here which was something about not being able to install the same script on the root domain. Couldn’t remember the exact wordings.

To fix the error, I deleted a file inside .fantasticodata folder called installed_in_root.php and after that, wordpress was installed successfully on the new webhost.

3 - Inside the new blog admin panel, I then Imported the data from the old blog by going to Manage>Import>Wordpress.

No errors encountered here.

Now for the important part that tells the domain name its now sitting on the new host: The Name Servers.

After the above steps, I logged in my domain’s account and changed the nameservers to hostgator’s nameservers.

I then waited ’til the domain propagation was complete and voila! I just transferred my blog to a new host!

Some things to note:

1) Change the permalink settings for the new blog. I used the %postname% settings. I almost forgot to change it. :p

2) Upload the blog’s theme.

3) Re-add the sidebar widgets.

4) Delete the default “Hello World” post and “About” page.

5) Plugins :  plugins are sometimes the main issues on why blog transfers yield errors. Since I wanted to restore some plugin stats, I just uploaded a fresh copy of the plugin to the plugin directory and imported the plugin database via phpmyadmin. I didn’t do this for all plugin installed, though.

I tried copying the entire directory and just pasting it on the new host, and importing the database, but while importing the database, I encountered some errors. So I just opted it to do the blog transfer as posted above.