Be Excellent To Each Other

Can anyone recommend a place to host a Wordpress blog? Ideally, free, and I'm not that bothered if the domain name has .blogspot or .wordpress or similar in it.

And does anyone know where in a wordpress installation (I'm with Hostgator) the export function lurks? Can't find the fecker.

The Export function is under Tools in the admin menu. That'll just export your content. If you'd rather take a copy of the whole site, you can use a plugin called All-in-One WP Migration which I've found very handy in the past. Bear in mind that it'll do absolutely everything - users, plugins, themes etc. It works best if the host your moving to already has the same domain name set up, but you can still get it working without.

I don't know if the out of the box export tool caters for this but if your new site has a different domain name altogether, you'll need to sweep through your content and update any URLs from the old to the new one. Fortunately there's a good tool for that as well - Better Search Replace

As for hosting, I can only recommend the one I used based on quality as they've been the fastest ones I've used, but they're not the cheapest. My crappy blog sits on their £2.95 a month (plus VAT) package and ConsoleMAD is on their £8.95 a month (plus VAT) package. Fast, but not cheap.

Could you just have the blog hosted on wordpress.com itself?

At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, what about WordPress.com ?

Yeah, that must be the best answer. I'd even looked at them!

And thanks Devilman, I'll have a scout about for that plugin.

Export has created a suspiciously small file. But given that export/import doesn't sound like a straightforward thing - at least, importing into a basic wordpress.com site may not be, because they don't give you full functionality - I might just stick with the copy of each page I took anyway. Thanks for the help.