Over the past week I have spent a decent amount of time moving my Drupal site from the dev environment on my Macintosh to a server so my site can be viewed on the Internet. Since I am a Drupal noob, the below is really meant for other Drupal noobs who may not want to do everything via command line interface but feel much more comfortable dragging and dropping v. coding and command line

Dev environment:Acquia stack for Mac with Drupal 7.4
Moving to Hostgator

Here are the steps I performed to move my website (digitalfireflymarketing) from my Macintosh using an Acquia Stack to my hostgator account.

1. Download latest Drupal software from Drupal. org.
2. If you don't have it download Filezilla
3. Unpack Drupal and place in file that you will reference when you FTP.
4. Using Filezilla log into Hostgator using the un and pw sent to you in their welcome email. It will be the cpanel UN and PW that will let you in.
5. Delete the "index" file you see in the public html file. This is file you see if you were to go on your domain and will advertise hostgator
6. Transfer the drupal files from the local file to public html file.
7. As the files are being transferred, create your SQL DB. Go to: cpanel, My SQL DB wizard. It will walk you through creating a DB and a UN. Use the wizard as it make everything much easier. Write down or remember you DB name, UN and Password as you will need them during the install process.
8. Go to your domain and hit refresh you should see the drupal install screen.
9. Begin the Drupal installation procedure. Drupal will make sure everything is OK on the server when you start the install. You will most likely get an error that the database is set to global settings. At this point contact Hostgator support and tell them the setting. They will change the setting for you.
10. Once the setting is changed, proceed with the rest of the install using the database name, UN and PW you set up earlier in my SQL wizard.
11. Once the site is set up, put the site into maintenance mode. You can do this under Configuration and then maintenance mode
12. On your local machine have acquia export your site. This is under settings.
13. Unpack the file in the FTP folder.
14. Rename the folder that is named yourdomain.localhost.com to simply yourdomain.com
15. Transfer all the files in your sites folder to the public.html/sites folder.
16. While the transfer is occurring, export the database from Acquia by clicking "manage my database" and clicking export at the top.
17. On the Hostgator Cpanel click on phpmyadmin click on your db name and import the sql db
18. On your laptop, click on the FTP file on your computer. click on you sites folder. Open up setting.php in a text editor
19. Go all the way to the bottom of the document.
20. Put "//" in front of base url. This is for multisites and the // will cause the server to ignore the command
21. Change the databse name, UN, and PW all to the database name in phpadmin
22. Save the file and import to host gator server in the same location. This will overwrite the old settings file.
21. Goto your website and hit refresh while logged in. This should show your website in all its glory.
22. Pat yourself on the back