it 'should' be relatively painless so long as your hosting is up to scratch.

Basically you'd just upload all of your files from your webroot and all subdirectories up to the serve and make sure the permissions are set correctly on the directories that need it.

You'd create a database on your hosting server and import a backup of your local database into it. Then you'd change the details in your db file in config to reflect the new server name and password etc.

One big gotcha is if you are running xampp on a windows pc by default mysql will set all the database table names in lower case. This will stop the database working if your new site is on a linux server.

You need to make sure your local mysql uses mixed case before creating your test instance or it'll be a real pain as you'll have to rename the tables on your server.

That's the process in very general terms.

just realised I'd missed some vital info.

If their installer can do the exact same version as you are running then you'd only need to upload your customisations, theme files, file assts etc, drop the tables on that install and import your db.

thanks - I'll have to do some checking. I've heard that Netfirms is not always up to date with phpmyadmin etc. and also with their versions of mysql etc.

I still haven't decided whether I'm going to a C5 site or just a simple text based site as it's quite small. I like the versatility of a CMS site but I've never had one of my text based sites go down because of db upgrades etc.

I found Concrete5 really easy for site transfer. Being a WordPress developer before I started developing for conctere5 there was a lot of manual labour to take over all the links etc. In Concrete5 everything is relative to the domain! Amazing.

Also for changing the database settings in concrete5.7 go to /Application/Config/database.php if memory serves.