I am in the midst of moving the Blog off the wordpress.com site onto some server space I purchased from Dreamhost. I have a few observations here:
1. The site may act a bit funny while I make the transition but hopefully not.
2. It should be illegal for someone with a political science degree to do this. My brain hurts and none of the “simple” steps are simple. If any readers feel pity, email me and I’ll share the gory details and beg for help.
My site was hosted at bluehost.com, but I had to move it when most of the American hosts stopped supporting “foreign IP Transfers”.
Anyway, in the process all the simple things that could fail did fail indeed. The sql backup was damaged, and my other backup failed too, plus a lot of other stuff. In fact I lost all of my articles.
But strangely enough I managed to recover over 95% of my stuff by searching for it on Google. It turned out that if someone had ever searched for an article on Google or got one of my pages in a Google search, it was live and kicking in Google cache files. Scary but very useful.
It is actually coming along pretty well. The folks at dreamhost.com are very helpful and have done most of the heavy lifting for me. I’m tweaking widgets on it at this time and I still need to conquer getting the podcast feed onto the new server with iTunes and I’m sure several other points. I also need to make sure the transition doesn’t cause me to disappear for all my rss readers
Sounds like you’re doing fine. I went through the same thing. My blog was on WordPress for only 6 weeks before I moved to a self-hosted blog. It took me weeks to figure out how to do it myself (not sure I should admit that) — even the step-by-step instructions offered by WordPress didn;t make sense because I didn’t get the underlying terms.
But once you get everything switched over, it is nice. Much greater flexibility through the use of plug-ins, etc.
I’m no expert, but I don’t see how you can keep the same feed URL since you will not have “WordPress” in the blog URL anymore. I would recommend setting up your feed through Feedburner. They have lots of nice options, and they recently upgraded their stats package for their free users to the Pro level previously available only to paying users. Among the options: setting up your feed to convert on-the-fly to RSS or Atom, depending on the reader’s feed reader, and converting the generic feed URL to the Feedburner feed URL. Plus they have a code generator that lets you append a graphic to your e-mail signatures that shows the latest hedlines from your blog and a feed subscription button. An easy way to publicize your blog.
A blog post announcing your move should be enough to motivate your current feed subscribers (like me) to go to the blog on your new host and sunscribe to the new feed URL.
Good luck finishing up the project!