One of the web hosting companies  I use suddenly went out of business but Liquidweb were kind enough to provide a backup of the data on the shared hosting account I used.  I had a number of  wordpress blogs , so to restore them , the  following steps are to be used. The shared hosting account had a Cpanel control panel and Fantastico for script installation

Locate the name of the site in the mySQL database using the siteurl field . The SQL file can be searched as a plain text file.

  • Install WordPress on a different shared hosting account.
  • Locate the database name, for example if it was problems_wrdp1 , rename it  to the database name in your new Cpanel account  useful_wrdp3 . Change the relevant prefix ,  account names to those on your new server.
  • Use phpmyAdmin and import the  SQL database.

Typically for WordPress 2.8.4, the  database will have 10 tables and the import will be completed after executing 84 queries.

This works satisfactorily for smaller databases , less than 2MB in size.