Bought a GoDaddy Host; Very Confused About Migrating

  • I haven’t even begun to install WordPress because I’m having trouble understanding a lot of things.

    I bought a GoDaddy host last night – a “Managed WordPress” account. I want to keep my domain name from WordPress.COM. I read that nameservers need to be altered. I did that last night after hours and hours of research on how to start all of this. The fact I had to do that much research to start is kind of silly to begin with.

    After that, I’m not sure what to do. The blog on WordPress was pulled offline (I read it can take a full day to propagate or something? Maybe I need to wait?), and my host says my domain is “DNS only, off-site”. Don’t really know what it means. I cannot access its zone file or anything right now. Don’t know if I’ll be able to later.

    In Managed WordPress, it wants me to migrate my blog to the host. I figured “oh this might be easy.” I spent all night last night and hours into this morning trying to wrap my head around it. It says it can’t migrate automatically if it’s still on WordPress.com, and that I “need to move it off of WordPress.com”, which is what I thought I was doing by buying a host for it? I looked up how to move it off of WordPress.com. From what it seems like, I need to install WordPress and set up FTP for the new host. But it also seems like I can’t access the new host…….. unless I migrate my WordPress.com site to the “Managed WordPress” click migration.

    Maybe I’m completely misunderstanding this, but I cannot find a simple solution anywhere to this problem. I’ve been banging my head against the wall forever. GoDaddy also wants my admin info. I don’t even have admin info yet, because I need to install WordPress, but I feel like I can’t install WordPress unless I have the host, but the host won’t let me host until I connect it with WordPress. It also wants my FTP credentials. How do I get those without hosting WordPress myself? I don’t get this at all.

    As I said, it could very well be that I’m totally missing something here, but I feel stuck in an endless loop and it’s driving me nuts. When I try to look up any guide whatsoever, they say I need plugins or that I need to install WordPress. Obviously, that advice doesn’t work for me. I’m kind of in the infant stage of pre-installing and I can’t even move my site.

    If it’s just that I need to wait for the DNS to switch, I can do that. But I also want to know what I’m supposed to do after that happens. If anyone has a very, very, very simplified guide on how to move and migrate everything from WordPress to GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress, I’d love to have it, because I can’t find it anywhere on the web. I’d hate to ask for a refund just because of how confusing it all is to me.

    In short, I’d really just like to start working on my site already.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Thread Starter Mel Thorn

    (@melthron)

    Should I just call GoDaddy instead?

    Contact godaddy that would be best. Do you have a backup of your blog?

    Thread Starter Mel Thorn

    (@melthron)

    I already called them this morning.
    In case anyone else tries to do something like this or gets stuck on it:

    They had me make an all new blog with their Manage WordPress host (rather than using my existing WordPress.com site), including creating a whole new username, password and everything. After that I imported my XML from my old blog, retaining my posts and other data. I was given a temporary URL for the moment, but they talked me through the process of transferring my domain to them, rather than keeping it on WordPress.com. My domain will be able to become active again after the five-seven day waiting period. I can now access the dashboard for the new site and can install plugins and such even while I have the temporary URL.

    Awesome, what tools are you using now to backup your site?

    Duplicator plugin looks good and it is free.

    Thread Starter Mel Thorn

    (@melthron)

    For the moment, I’m using UpDraft, and a couple security plugins.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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