Site Migration – 1

A tale of migration woes – Part 1

Why I am moving

This article is a post in a WordPress.com blog. I have a number of such blogs and have started to move some of them to a self-hosted site. Blogs here don’t cost anything, but they are not entirely free. Advertising is inserted after the post and before the social and “like” features and comments. You can scroll down to see what that looks like on this site.

Here is what such advertising looked like for many years, and still does on sites that are relatively obscure and don’t get many visitors. Yes, this is from one of my current sites.

When I visit one of my more popular sites, I see something like this:

Not only is the area taken up by the ads large and overpowering, often larger than my post takes up, but they are obnoxious, distasteful, and bordering on obscene.

What is especially galling is the note from WordPress at the top.

Occasionally, some of your visitors may see an advertisement here …

They have the audacity to use the words occasionally, some, and may, when in fact they throw this garbage into the face of every visitor.

Well, as I said in a previous post, I have had it, I am fed up, and I am going to move my sites, most of them, to self-hosting.

Self-Hosting

An identifying feature is the address. Take a look above and note that the internet address, the domain name, ends in “wordpress.com“. This one starts with my name, the full domain name is “ludwigkeck.wordpress.com“. I have had this blog and this address for about a dozen years.

Blogs, and other websites, can also be “self-hosted”. No, I don’t mean that I need a server in my basement that is connected to the internet, but rather that I pick a hosting provider and do much of the installation and “heavy lifting” myself. The provider I picked has a good reputation, is rated highly and is recommended by WordPress. The service plan I chose allows me to have a number of different websites there. The hosting provider provides space on a server and a number of other features and services. This is shared hosting as a substantial number of other customers also get space on that server. They have many servers to provide the storage space and computing power to their many customers.

Of course, such hosting costs money. There are hosting companies that are quite inexpensive, starting around just one dollar (U.S. $1) per month, going up to hundreds of dollars per month for large, sophisticated sites that get thousands of visitors a day. I will be paying about $100 per year.

On self-hosted sites the WordPress “engine” is available from WordPress.org. That makes the site work almost the same as over on WordPress.com. More features are available, even most of the same themes. Everything, well almost, is familiar and managing the site and adding posts requires little in new learning.

WordPress even provides tools for migrating from WordPress.com to a self-hosted site using WordPress.org.

On the WordPress.com side in the Dashboard under Tools is the Export option. This prepares a file for downloading to one’s own computer. That file contains page and post details and instructions for the Import tool on the new site.

On the new site WordPress has to be installed, most hosts make that step very easy. The new site needs to have a domain name. Most hosts also provide domain name registration, that’s another $10 or more per year. The new site has to be set up with theme, site name, and other details. Then in the Dashboard, again under Tools, the Import option can be used to transfer or migrate a site.

I did that with one of my sites, migrating cafeludwig.wordpress.com to phototalk.cafeludwig.com.

All went well for five minutes then I got this:

I scrubbed what had been imported and started over. After five minutes again I got the Service Unavailable message. After another try with the same results, I turned to the hosting providers help chat.

How that saga proceeded I will share in another post soon.

.:. © 2022 Ludwig Keck