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Domain Hosting
Hey, so I'm thinking of moving my blog over to my own domain. Does anyone have their own site? Who do you use? If you moved your blog were you able to keep your comments (I really don't want to lose them)?
I'm really technologically stupid so I need something easy. Also, free/cheap helps. Thanks!
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Shelly on -
Can't you do that with wordpress? I'm technology challanged, so I'm not 100% but I thought you could.
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Permalink Reply by Kimberly on -
I think I'm actually going to do this this weekend! I'll let you know how it goes :)
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Permalink Reply by Nuggles on -
Thanks guys! And yeah, keep me posted! Wordpress and Blogger are both starting to piss me off so I'm just looking to control my own site.
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Permalink Reply by Eric the BeehiveHairdresser on -
You can do the move fairly easily via the WordPress.com and WordPress.org features (export/import once you have the domain pointed properly) and keep your comments/pics/posts etc if done properly, however, you will be opening up a whole other can of worms with self hosting -- especially when you start to get up into the thousand(s) of daily visitors.
Before picking your host, google search "xyz host sucks" and see what comes up. All hosts have had customers with horror stories (I had several with BlueHost), but try to find a host that has more positive than negative stories/stats on the net.
Tool around http://www.hostingsthatsuck.com/ for what they have to say about various hosts.
Also, when starting up, don't believe the things that the sales reps tell you. They are selling you a service via voice that has the fine print in writing that negates what they are saying sometimes. Nothing is truly unlimited or free with hosts -- also, most hosts that offer 'free' domain purchase actually then hold ownership of your domain, so it might be best to go with godaddy for domain registration and then a less expensive host for the hosting.
Umm...what else? Make sure that your hotlinking in enabled to not have people steal your bandwidth and get WP Super Cache to help keep your server from crashing once lots of people start going to the domain. Set up adsense or some other ad service to help offset the cost of the servers.
Email me if you get stuck somewhere, I'm on your blogroll.
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Permalink Reply by Nuggles on
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I know, your blog really helps get me through my homesickness. So, thanks. :)
Would you recommend that I stay where I am and forget about the self hosting in general? I know you have your own domain, but were you ever on Wordpress/Blogger/somewhere else? If you were, what was easier?
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Permalink Reply by Eric the BeehiveHairdresser on
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It's hard to recommend to self host or not to self host since it depends on what it is that you want to get out blogging.
Do you blog primarily for yourself? For other bloggers? For your real life friends? Or do you blog for the ability to reach and be read by as many people as possible? Or want to venture off to write for a living (which is super hard to actually make a living at)? Or do you blog for some other reason?
Some Pros for Self Hosting:
If you're on your own domain you're more likely to get listed higher up on search engines and receive more traffic/readers. This wider audience can be a great platform if you want to eventually publish a book. You can also earn some money on a self hosted blog (but I think that you can do this on Blogspot too), which you can't due on WP.com. You also don't have to worry about WP or Blogspot shutting down your blog if you break one of their rules. In the end, you have control over every last feature on your website.
Some Cons for Self Hosting:
It can easily cost money (roughly $100 a year to start -- paid upfront most times). You need to figure out a whole new world of technology. Pointing the DNS server. Installing WP. Keeping up with updates. Backing up your site's files. Install themes/plug ins/widgets. That's just the normal run of the mill routine of self hosting.
A self hosted blog that pays $5 to $15 per month in hosting is on a shared server. Most hosts jam hundreds, if not thousands of sites onto their servers -- it's called a shared server.
If one site on the server gets onto the front page or Digg or Fark or something, the whole server with the hundreds or thousands of other paying customers goes down. Everyone's site will show up 404 Error and the hosting company will then need to figure out what to do to fix the mess. I've both had this happen to me where my site lost thte server due to someone else and have been the cause of the server going down -- internet popularity isn't always a good thing.
Either way the server goes down, it's not a fun time since you'll then spend 30 to 60 minutes frantically hoping that it comes back online while you're on the phone with the data center. You'll also open yourself up more to getting hacked. I did, lost several photo galleries, and never had the time to replace them.
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In the end though, despite all of the annoyances that sometimes occur thanks to having a self hosted blog, I love the fact that it's self hosted.
To your question:
I originally had beehivehairdresser.blogspot.com and had to abandon it after my job blocked all of blogspot in 2007. At first I found WP to be all sorts of unfriendly simply because I didn't know the layout and features, but once I got the hang of it I loved it far more that Blogger. I've since gone back to the Blogger dashboard and couldn't figure things out easily. So, I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not a fan of change when it comes to a dashboard.
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Permalink Reply by cooper on -
I use siteground and with this link you can get a year of hosting and a domain name for all for 9.95.
I think it still works, they sent this to all their customers. I love them, no problems and I've been with them several years.
I moved from blogger, but it was a long time ago, the whole blog moved ok but back them blogger was different, so the comments were sporadic. It works much better now - the transfer. I've helped a couple people transfer their blogs over.
If the host sucks your experience might be worse but I've never had an issue.
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Permalink Reply by Nuggles on
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Wow. OK, I have to lot to think about. I'm going to check out all these hosts and let you guys know what I come up with.
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Permalink Reply by Cassie on -
Wow, reading Eric's responses to this makes me question whether my recent self-hosting choice was a good move, haha. I know next to nothing about any of this stuff, yet still managed to make the transition successfully. (Though I had plenty of headaches throughout and wanted to give up.)
Still, my goal is to ultimately have a lot of web traffic... that was one of the reasons I made the switch from Blogspot to self-hosted WP.org. That and the fact that my Blogspot URL was incompatible with my blog's name.
These sentences from Eric confuse me:
Make sure that your hotlinking in enabled to not have people steal your bandwidth and get WP Super Cache to help keep your server from crashing once lots of people start going to the domain.
Pointing the DNS server.
If one site on the server gets onto the front page or Digg or Fark or something, the whole server with the hundreds or thousands of other paying customers goes down. Everyone's site will show up 404 Error and the hosting company will then need to figure out what to do to fix the mess.
(And that last one just scares me.)
Sigh...
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Permalink Reply by Nick Tabick on -
Make sure that your hotlinking in enabled to not have people steal your bandwidth and get WP Super Cache to help keep your server from crashing once lots of people start going to the domain.
Hot-linking is when somebody uses a resource (usually an image, but JavaScript isn't uncommon) from somebody else's site rather than uploading it somewhere that they control/pay for. This means that the person originally hosting the file is possibly being billed for the hot-linker's traffic every time they access that file. This also means that the hot-linker is relying on the person to not change the file out, change where it's stored, or remove it entirely.
Simplified: If you do a Google Image Search for something and just copy the URL for the image and paste it into your blog, you're guilty of hot-linking. Eric's just trying to save you from having other people do this with your content.
WordPress (and all other content-management systems) have to dynamically generate the page each time somebody requests it. Caching allows the site to generate a temporary "static" version that already has all the content filled in, then serve that to visitors looking for the content. By not having to generate the page each time, it cuts down on the amount of time and CPU consumption required to handle incoming traffic. WP-Super-Cache is a common plugin used to enable WordPress users to set this up easily.
If one site on the server gets onto the front page or Digg or Fark or something, the whole server with the hundreds or thousands of other paying customers goes down. Everyone's site will show up 404 Error and the hosting company will then need to figure out what to do to fix the mess.
With shared hosting, everybody using the host runs the risk of having their site drowned out if one of the websites on the same server has their site posted to large social news sites like Slashdot, Digg, or Reddit. I'm a little confused about the specific mention of the 404 error (which is the HTTP numeric for "not found" - used when you type an invalid URL), as the most common response in these cases is a 500 ("Internal Server Error").
If you host yourself (i.e. pay for the actual server as opposed to space on the server), you don't really have this issue. There's a lot more work involved in maintaining the underlying infrastructure, though, which is why I don't recommend this for most of the people here.
Pointing the DNS server.
When you manage your domain and server separately, you need to add a DNS entry to your domain that indicates where your content is hosted. DNS is the technology that allows you to enter "http://www.twoslashes.com" into your web browser instead of an IP address and still come up with content.
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Permalink Reply by Eric the BeehiveHairdresser on
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Thank you, Nick. I couldn't have said it better.
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Permalink Reply by Cassie on
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Thanks for such a detailed response, Nick. I think I get the general idea of hot-linking now, and I even remember seeing something about a caching plugin for WP now that I think about it, so I'll go enable that one ASAP. I guess there's nothing I can do about the shared hosting issue (I use DreamHost... pretty sure that's under the "shared hosting" category), but it seems that issue would be DreamHost's responsibility anyway?
And I guess pointing the DNS server doesn't apply to me! Cool!
Sorry, Kosher, for gettin' all up in yo' thread, though clearly Nick's response to my confused self can be very helpful to you as well!
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