The following are issues that some of the people who have gone through the switch to self-hosting, and how we fixed them.
- Holly had a problem with Step 9 in the process outlined on the Self-Hosting page. There is an option asking "Do you want to include attachments?" When she checked the box next to it, the transfer froze at some point. When she tried again without checking the box, everything worked fine, and all photos and everything made it to her new blog. You might want to try checking the box first, and unchecking it if there's a problem.
- Rachel tried to find her old theme to use on her new blog, but it wasn't in the Wordpress directory. She found it by doing a Google search. If you're intent on keeping your theme the same, make sure you can find it available for download before signing up for hosting, just in case it's not in the Wordpress directory.
- If the export/import file that's created is larger than 2 megabytes (if your blog is big), you'll get an error saying it's too large when you try to import. Before you pay for hosting, you can check to see if you'll have this problem by following the instructions to create the export file and seeing how large it is. But even if it's larger than 2 megabytes, it seems to be an easy fix. Hallie had this problem and the hosting company support was able to fix it quickly by changing a few lines of code to allow larger file sizes. See my comment #17 on the original post for more details about what to tell them. The actual importing may take a while, depending on how much content you have on your blog. When I did it, I had only been blogging for two weeks, so it was very quick. Holly, who did it after about five months of blogging, said it took much longer to complete the import.
If you have further questions, feel free to contact me. Even if I can't answer your question, I might be able to help you explain to the Bluehost people what's going on. Don't worry, in my experience they've been extremely helpful.
