Migrating from Free wordpress blog to your own domain

[Gaz]

It's a pretty easy question. how simple is it to migrate your blog from a free site (wordpress preferably, but blogger if necessary) to a wordpress blog maintained on a private domain.

Basically, I have a few ideas that I want to start, but I don't really want to invest the money into private hosting until the sites can pay for themselves. However, if the migration is a nightmare, I'll have to come up with a separate plan.

[Vanessa]

I wouldn't worry about migrating your content. The hassles come with updating your post urls and your backlink traffic.

WP has great content migration tools. What you will want to worry about is migrating all your old urls to your new private domain. Lots of 301 redirects will need to be done if you don't own the original domain or find a plugin that will do this for you. The other thing you loose when moving over is all your backlinks that others used to your old domain won't go over to your new domain and increase your authority, and there's no plugin that will change these for you.

Thoughts on moving over to Wordpress

[Gaz]

Thanks for the incredibly useful information. post urls I'm generally pretty good at making those migration friendly - (lots of time spent moving websites around - I guess you only learn the hard way), and I suppose if I got the backlinks before, I could probably get them again.

Thanks - Looks like I'll be able to get some of the projects started that I wanted to but was a little short on the finances to go ahead with them.

[investorblogger]

Don't worry about moving from Blogspot. Once you're in WP, you'll find things just that much easier, quicker and you'll have more freedom. Once you migrate, you'll find that the temporary sacrifice is worth every minute. I would never use Blogspot. Ever. Now.

[michael.shearer]

For probably less than $100, you can get shared hosting in lots of places that will host a Wordpress site.

I use Dreamhost, I know a lot of people who complain, but I have had few problems and have installed and developed close to 20 different wordpress sites.

[Chris Cade]

Originally Posted by Gaz

It's a pretty easy question. how simple is it to migrate your blog from a free site (wordpress preferably, but blogger if necessary) to a wordpress blog maintained on a private domain.

Basically, I have a few ideas that I want to start, but I don't really want to invest the money into private hosting until the sites can pay for themselves. However, if the migration is a nightmare, I'll have to come up with a separate plan.

If you don't have a host yet, I think HostGator even does the migration for you. I use them and have been pleased overall - and at $10-$15/month to host unlimited domains, it's a great deal and one of the best decisions I ever made (even before my sites could pay for themselves).

[Bruce Achterberg]

www.nearlyfreespeech.net

I wrote a short post about NFS here:
Love Dollars Blogging! Help me out!

The main reason you should care about NFS is because they charge you fairly for what you use, not what you don't, which should help if you don't have oodles of cash and if you don't need massive bandwidth per month (although they can handle a fair bit of bandwidth for a decent price from what I read).

I actually pay for their hosting now; works well. Need to put it to the test more before I can comment comprehensively on the quality of the service. So far so good. Their customer service is pretty speedy, too. (Can't remember how speedy, but I remember it being pretty impressive.)

[Gaz]

Maybe a bit more clarification is required.

I currently have a webhost. I'm very happy with my webhost, and if I want to host more blogs on unique domain names I'll use them. The problem is, I have about 4 or 5 different ideas that don't really work together, and will each need individual sites. Until I know whether I will be able to generate any amount of traffic, I'm not willing to pay for hosting. Hence can I migrate the pages from wordpress to their own host.

[Chris Cade]

Originally Posted by Gaz

Maybe a bit more clarification is required.

I currently have a webhost. I'm very happy with my webhost, and if I want to host more blogs on unique domain names I'll use them. The problem is, I have about 4 or 5 different ideas that don't really work together, and will each need individual sites.

You must not be familiar with shared hosting and Hostgator. With shared hosting, you can host as many individual sites, with unique domain names, as you want, for under $10/month.

I used to have a great webhost, but it got very expensive when I started getting 2 and 3 sites going because each one cost me a new hosting account.

With Hostgator, I tried setting up one fairly unimportant domain. I liked the service, so I transitioned all of my sites over to it.

Now, whenever I have a new website idea I pay Godaddy $7 / yr and set it up on Hostgator... and Hostgator doesn't charge a single penny more than my normaly monthly charge.

$10-$15/month for unlimited unique websites / domain names to be hosted is a pretty good deal in my opinion... even for bootstrappers.

[Gaz]

Ah, now that I was not aware of. Maybe I'll have to investigate it a little closer.

Thanks for the clarification.

[Chris Cade]

Originally Posted by Gaz

Ah, now that I was not aware of. Maybe I'll have to investigate it a little closer.

Thanks for the clarification.

You bet - I'm grateful to be of service

I remember when I first learned about shared hosting... and I thought, "This is insane!"

Suddenly the dozen ideas I had became reality in less than a year. Seriously... I have almost a dozen websites hosted at Hostgator and I still only pay $15/month (because I upgraded from the $10/month plan)

The general evolution of an internet business that has multiple sites often goes something like this:

1) Buy single-site hosting that is excellent
2) Buy multiple single-site hosting and realize it's expensive
3) Move all sites over to shared hosting. Watch expenses drop dramatically.
4) Grow business and move to dedicated hosting. Expenses go up again.

[Gaz]

Originally Posted by Chris Cade

The general evolution of an internet business that has multiple sites often goes something like this:

1) Buy single-site hosting that is excellent
2) Buy multiple single-site hosting and realize it's expensive
3) Move all sites over to shared hosting. Watch expenses drop dramatically.
4) Grow business and move to dedicated hosting. Expenses go up again.

Yeah, the evolution I was following was something similar. It went

1) buy single site hosting for personal website.
2) use a whole bunch of subdomains to try out ideas.
3) Realise that subdomains aren't the best way to go.
4) Be unable to afford to buy dedicated hosting for any of the ideas.
5) Look for alternatives until sites can fund their own dedicated hosting.

Still can't really afford the hostgator package, (the exchange rate is a killer) but I have some things that look like they may pay off sooner rather than later which I can then use for hostgator.

[Chris Cade]

Originally Posted by Gaz

Yeah, the evolution I was following was something similar. It went

1) buy single site hosting for personal website.
2) use a whole bunch of subdomains to try out ideas.
3) Realise that subdomains aren't the best way to go.
4) Be unable to afford to buy dedicated hosting for any of the ideas.
5) Look for alternatives until sites can fund their own dedicated hosting.

Still can't really afford the hostgator package, (the exchange rate is a killer) but I have some things that look like they may pay off sooner rather than later which I can then use for hostgator.

Yeah I did the subdomain thing too... I forgot about that! And then there's also the subdirectory approach which I tried also unsuccessfully.