Making a Move
So, things look a little different around here, huh?
Yeah, remember how I was discussing the issues I’ve been having with inodes on my website host? Well, one of my thoughts was to move this blog to a separate host since it takes quite a bit of resources on the server.
I did some looking around and comparing, and as crazy as it sounds, I discovered moving my blog to a WordPress.com account was actually the best option for me. So why would I choose to move my self-hosted blog that had all the freedom of plugins and theme customization to a place where I’d lack all those things?
Here’s my thoughts on that.
First. I don’t want another Baby Croc plan. I don’t want to fork over another $12 a month just for one blog.
Well, there’s a lot of different hosts that tout WordPress hosting at a low price. They start you out at $2.00-something a month, and they catch you at the checkout by making you pay 36 months up front or something. And then, upon renewal, they jack the price up to $12 a month or more. I’m looking at you HostGator.
Some of them have a cap on how many visitors you can get in a month. I’m looking at you, BlueHost. So what happens if you have a popular post and you break 10K visits? Does your site shut down for the rest of them month? Do you pay a fee? Yeah, no.
So, a WordPress.com account is free. But I obviously wanted to use my domain name, so I ponied up the $2.99 a month for a year to have that.
The transfer went well. I have a huge site, and transferring the images took two days as the migration tool takes a loooong time, and I decided transferring a month at a time was best.
I did find a free theme that I liked, so that’s a plus. The lack of plugins isn’t as restricting as I thought it would be. Turns out there’s a lot of plugins I don’t really need.
The two things that I’m not so happy about is the lack of FTP for image retrieval and the low storage space.
Without FTP, all I can do is export media to another WordPress blog. This means that I’m going to have to be more careful about archiving images just in case I ever decide to make another move.
3GB storage space for images is pretty low for me. I’ve been spoiled by having “unlimited” space for many years. Already, my blog has that over 40% full. However, if I ever get to the point that I need more, I suppose I could upgrade, and it would still be cheaper than self-hosting.
The one positive is that all the traffic and resources that my blog has been generated is moving off of my self-hosted server. So it’s less I have to be concerned about. Hopefully keeping my domain will make it a smooth transition and no one will need to update links or anything.
I’ve discovered a few of my older posts are missing pictures from when I migrated from Clean Casuals to Aywren.com, and I’m fixing them as I have time. That was an issue even back on the self-hosted blog that I wasn’t aware of, though.
So far, so good. As long as WordPress.com remains reliable, I think this is a change for the better.