Import plugin not importing posts, comments, pages

I am trying to migrate a site to private hosting from the wordpress.com site.

I downloaded the export XML from the original site (at about 206kB, not terribly large I don’t think) and went through the steps of installing the import plugin and using it in my fresh install of WordPress.

I uploaded the XML file, chose the user to assign the posts to, selected the option to import images/media and then when I got through to the next part all I saw was a blank page which said “WordPress Import” at the top. Wasn’t terribly reassuring but I left it for a bit assuming it would tell me when the procedure was complete. This didn’t happen. I must’ve waited 10 minutes at least. So, I tried again; this time it told me some (image) files already existed so I thought “oh, it was doing something then?” and left it some more. Still, nothing for a while. I started it again and it showed more (image) files had been downloaded.

At this point I was growing concerned and so started googling around. I found people with slightly similar problems, I checked my php config (I do not believe I have access to modify it) and found that max execution time was plenty (120s) and max memory limit was huge (128MB) so timeouts and memory limits were probably not the cause ( though I couldn’t find out how to access PHP logs through cPanel so I couldn’t be 100% certain about that ). I checked in my database and found that all the posts were in there, so I checked in the WordPress admin and found that the posts were not listed there. Neither were any pages. Media, tags and categories were there, though, but none of it is associated with any posts.

I have looked around but haven’t managed to find an exact description of the problem I am seeing. I was just wondering if anybody has any ideas about what this issue is? Should the importer be giving me feedback as it processes the information? I guess it’s not supposed to be a blank page.

Perhaps it is taking an unusually long time because the site does contain a reasonably large number of photographs? (roughly 88, some are >5MB)