Wow, its been a while.. 17 Months to be exact. My last post was dated 29 Dec 2019. In 2020, the worldwide pandemic happened, I was experiencing writers block 50% of the time, and when the other 50% spark came, long working hours, kids and life in general got in the way.
It wasn’t until I got the notification from wordpress.com reminding me that I need to renew my premium plan did I login to my account for the first time in a year, to do something about it. I had initially wanted to bite the bullet and just renew for another year but something inside me just couldn’t justify spending $100+ to maintain the blog for another year, especially when I’m not even attempting to monetize, and I certainly did not need the add-on features that came associated with a premium WP.com account.
So, since I still had a 3 months timeline before the premium plan expired on me, I thought, why not source for a new hosting provider? It would be fun (or so I thought) and I had ample time to slowly do things at my own pace, one step at a time over small pockets of time that I can find during weekends, while juggling with the rest of the things happening in my life.
The first order of things was to find a new hosting provider. I maintain most of the domains that I own on Namecheap. Naturally, that was the first place that I looked. But I wasn’t satisfied with their wordpress hosting service. It was ok but felt glitchy – couldn’t even cancel the trial on my own and had to contact customer service for it, so I went on to source for others.
After doing some detailed study, I finally settled on Bluehost. The cost of hosting is at a fraction of what WordPress.com charges, but of course, it was a bare basic plan. And since I still wanted to maintain independence of my domains management via Namecheap, I had to do even more.
After doing the setup on bluehost, the first step was to migrate my blog posts to Bluehost. WordPress does provide migration services, but unfortunately, it was not 100% foolproof. There were missing posts that I had to manually fix.
Next was mapping the domain on Namecheap to Bluehost. That took the longest because 75% of the time was really spent on figuring out how to do it. It was much simpler when I used WordPress.com when I had bought the domain together as part of the package. I had to transfer the domain out from WordPress to NameCheap, which will be the main domain management service that I’ll be using for all my domains moving forward, and then mapping it to Bluehost. That took a bit of tinkering but alas, I got it up and running.
Next was installing a SSL Certificate for my personalized domain. WordPress had done it seamlessly for me previously but with the bare minimum plan I purchased with Bluehost, it was a different approach. I had to decide which type of SSL certificate to purchase, activate and install the SSL certificate on Bluehost, in order for my site to be legit (meaning Google decides that you’re not some fly by night website that’s out to steal people’s data). While the steps were simple and straight forward, it took me awhile to figure out what exactly had to be done. Thankfully, the guys at NameCheap was with me all the way and was invaluable in providing the help and support I needed. So, new skill unlocked – Installing an SSL Certificate via the C-Panel of BlueHost.
So, while nothing has changed on the front end, my blog is now hosted and powered by BlueHost, with NameCheap as my main Domain Management Service. So while it might not be significant to many, I’m not ashamed to share that I’m super proud of myself for taking the plunge, and embarking on this DIY. Here’s to unlocking new knowledge and saving some money!
Now, on to figuring out how to transfer the mail service out from WordPress to be directly contracted with G-Suite next.
Do you also maintain a blog with personalized domain? How do you do it? Would love to know if there’a better way at this.
About Kaye
Grew up in Singapore, stood on the cusp of the internet revolution, and surfed it (literally). My “cloud” was made up of FTP servers and free VM software, my “WiFi” was LAN cables that ran across the walls in trunking that my dad hand-laid. I learned to code in Turbo Pascal, and subsequently, Delphi (if you know them, you’re probably as old as I am, or older). 🙂
I’m fascinated by all things digital and still bear nostalgia towards childhood gadgets. My first Pentium-I PC that ran on Windows’98 which I hand-coded my entire A-Levels computing project with, the comforting sound of the 56K modem, the fun I had with the Nintendo Popeye Handheld, the fights with my siblings over who got to use the landline, and my original Nokia 3310 that’s still sitting somewhere in my mom’s house. Not to mention the grande dames of the living room – the television sets that I grew up watching.
I would love to hear your thoughts on my articles. So do connect with me and let me know what you think of my articles.! 🙂
Connect with me:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayehau/
Twitter: @kayehau
Email: kaye.hau@generaltechtalk.com
Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash