My boss Mike needed to move his wine review blog from a friend’s hosting on lunarpages. I suggested he try dreamhost and he liked it – in a few minutes he had signed up for a free trial and used their 1-click install to set up a new install of wordpress.

Before he moved his domain to point from lunarpages to dreamhost I got him to prep by writing down a few important pieces of info. I’m trying to make sure I make this easier for other friends like I did when I helped Tove’s Thread For Thought move from WordPress.org to her own host.

Things to do before you change your domain to point to your new hosting

Write down the name of your THEME. If you want to use the same theme, it’s important to write this down before you make the switch.
Export your blog content from wordpress.
Download your images. The wordpress export guide pretends this is easy, but it isn’t. If you are using the same domain name, I’m not sure what the easy way to do this is.

How to download your images

I wrote a python script that does this for you.
Make sure your system supports python. Next install BeautifulSoup – a great html parser for python.
Once that’s done, download this little script and change home and filesUrl to be your domain name.
Run the script, it should crawl your domain and download all of the images you host. Now follow the same steps of editing your export if needed and upload it all into your new blog at your new domain.

Hope that helps!