The process of moving from a WordPress.com to a self-hosted website was involved, but it didn’t take nearly as long as I feared. It took a few minutes to register my domain with a registrar, another few minutes to sign up with a different service for website hosting, and another few minutes to properly set up my domains. It’s been a while since I’ve done a domain registration, but I’m pleased to see the wait time was minutes instead of hours. (A decade ago, it could take up to 72 hours for this process to happen.)
As much I found myself disappointed with WordPress.com hosting, they did make exporting my data easy enough. I was able to export all my posts, pages, and all of your reader comments. However, I was not able to easily import my images. They remain linked to my WordPress.com account. The redirect feature from WordPress means that anyone clicking on links from my old URL will automatically be transferred to this new URL. Of course, I was charged $13 per year for this honor, but WP is lucky the feature works well enough. Visually, I was able to recreate my theme and layout, though in some places I had to do light coding in pure HTML. This took up the bulk of my time with the transfer.
Ultimately, I got what I wanted by taking the self-hosted route. The ability to turn the default Gutenberg editor off, and use plugins has been a godsend. I also love the fact that I don’t have to pay WordPress.com a premium of $25 a month or $300 a year just to use these features. By comparison, I’m paying a bit under $5 per month for the hosting, $10 per year for the domain, and that aforementioned $13 a year for the redirect.
I did some light housekeeping after the transfer. The Blogroll links have been updated in the sidebar. I’ve also added a Privacy Policy page, and I may add additional pages in the future. If you have a similar comic-related blog, let me know. I’ll be happy to add you to the Blogroll.
As for blogging for the week, as I said no new roundup post. Which means I get to start fresh next Monday. For the meantime, have a few items of interest to hold you all over:
-I posted a little about page 839 of Home on Tumblr for Grass Cake’s open comments.
-Zombiee Reviews on Tumblr has been posting wonderful essays about Home’s characters. Ranach and Rogio have been covered, and Keirr is next.
And I think I’ll call it a night here.
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whoo! congrats!
Thanks! 😀
Congratulations!
Thank you so much!
Congrats
and how to exports my WordPress stuff? as well what’s your self-hosted Website where you moved your wordpress blog there?
Thank you!
And exporting isn’t too difficult. Let’s start from the beginning:
First, if you go the self-hosted route, you’ll need a domain registrar and a web host. You can either have a separate registrar for your domain and your host, or you can do them together. The choice is yours.
Second pick a domain name you want to use. Porkbun.com is nice and cheap for most options, and they’re what I use. They offer webhosting as well. However, I went with Dreamhost.com for my hosting. Hostinger.com, and Interserver.net are other recommended choices. Dreamhost is the cheapest at $5 a month for self-hosted, though they offered a managed version similar to WordPress.com for about three times as much. Depends on how much work you want to do. If your registrar is different from your web host, you’ll need to point your domain from the registrar to the web host. They tell you how to do this.
Here’s a guide, start a step 2. https://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/wordpress-blog/how-to-move-your-wordpress-com-site-to-a-self-hosted-environment/ Basically, export from WordPress.com, you can save your images, but they’re not included in the export. Unzip the .xml file, and upload that to your new host. That’s the easiest way I can explain it. You’ll also want to avoid using Jetpack plugins, you do want Askimet to protect against spam.
what about Free domain names?
self-hosting for free?
Hmmm. There is free hosting available. I don’t know about free domain names, though. All the ones I’ve ever had, I paid for them, as you have to register them and pay a fee. Best you can do is a cheap domain name. But for free self-hosting, here are two places that seem decent:
https://freehosting.com/free-hosting.html
https://www.infinityfree.com/
The last one allows for a subdomain name, much like with WordPress.com.