Upgrading help

I would like to upgrade to 2.5.1 but I am afraid to do so because it does not seem so simple and it does not look like there are upgrade installation steps provided by WordPress. Instead, they recommend getting a new host or using WordPress.com instead which I do not want to do.

My blog is hosted on A Small Orange. I saw these steps in another topic by nolageek:

My upgrade process… usually takes 5 minutes, tops.

1. Download backup of database.

2. Upload unzipped WordPress to /wordpress-new via FTP.

3. Rename current /wordpress to /wordpress-old.

4. Copy /wordpress-old/.htaccess to /wordpress-new

5. Copy /wordpress-old/wp-config.php to /wordpress-new

6. Copy /wordpress-old/wp-content to /wordpress-new

7. Rename /wordpress-new to /wordpress

8. Go to /wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php

Don’t forget to make sure wp-content and .htaccess are properly chmodded.

If anything happens you’ve got the database backed up and ALL of your old files on the server. just restore the database and rename /wordpress-old to /wordpress

I actually have:

/wordpress
/wordpress-old
/wordpress-really-old

Could also do
/wordpress
/wordpress-2.2.2
/wordpress-2.2.1

so that you know what the older versions are. I’ve been doing it this way for years.

I think I will give this a shot unless someone with more knowledge of this would be willing to give me a hand, I can be reached at johnny.makkar [at] gmail.com or if anyone can recommend a good OS X app that helps with WordPress upgrades if one exists. Thanks.