I recently migrated this site (and about 15 others) to our hosting platform. It was relatively painless but I don’t think I will do the WordPress site the same way next time.
I took the lazy admins approach to FTP downloading the files; taking a MySQL dump and then installing the same version of WordPress on the new server. After it was installed I FTP uploaded the files and forcefully updated the database to whatever was on the old host.
Surprisingly this method worked quite well. Except that a bunch of my hosts had some special characters in them (I guess I should have checked the collation a bit better). Also, after the upload I couldn’t actually post anything to the blog. Obviously I fixed it or you wouldn’t be reading this. I found that I actually had to deactivate and reactivate every single plugin that I have installed on the site; not sure why but it was required but that was all I needed to do.
In the future I will use the import/export tools that are available; I guess being lazy/creative I didn’t even notice those tools were available until it was too late and the DNS had propagated. Live and learn!
Seems fine now. Happy blogging!
~JCF