Well that was a lot easier than I was expecting and took less than an hour from start to finish.

Let me go through the tasks just in case you are thinking of doing the same yourself and wondering.

Export Existing Posts

My previous blog was a self hosted WordPress one so had the option to export all posts to a nice simple XML file

Create WordPress.com account and blog

Having created an account at WordPress.com for free I then went through the process of setting up a new blog

Import posts into new blog

Because we are going WordPress to WordPress, this is easy and just involved importing the XML file we exported earlier

Move the domain

Here is where things start to get serious. I went to my domain registrar and set the name servers to the 3 given in the WordPress setup guide. Once this is done, I then go into the WordPress control panel and provide all the details of the domain and pay my $9.97 premium feature fee.

We are now in a position where markroddis.com now points at my WordPress blog which is great except for one thing. WordPress is only a blog and on my old hosted server I also had all my mail running as well. On top of this, WordPress whilst now controlling my domain via their name servers don’t offer any domain management or DNS management features.

Now the great news here is that WordPress have preconfigured the option to use Google Apps for just this purpose so now we move onto step 2.

Create a Google Applications account

Another free service and again, only a few minutes to set up. Now the clever thing here is that Google require you to upload a file to your site in order to confirm you are the owner of the domain. WordPress have thought of this so that file is already installed.

Bring it all together.

This is where it really could not get easier.

In order to get Google mail working, all I need to do it check the box under the WordPress control panel

All the DNS and MX settings are preset.

So that’s it. Job done.

My Blog is now here hosted on WordPress, my mail is now hosted with Google apps and from the outside looking in, nothing appears to have changed.

As a result of this, even though I have the $10 annual charge for the WordPress domain support, I am no longer paying for and maintaining a hosting account so less outgoings and less work.

All I now need to do over the next few days is tidy up a few old posts, hunt down where we had images hosted on the old server that are still linked and a bit of testing.

If anything looks a bit odd, let me know but other than that, welcome to our new home.