Flirty made a plea for help in a comment on my previous post. She wants to set-up her own domain and move her blog there. Now we’re all nice folks so we’re going to help aren’t we? Of course we are. So this is the way it’s going to work: I will set down some stuff here. You will add to it. This includes lurkers - yes, you too - just use a valid email when commenting or else I will end up trawling through Akismet spam to retrieve it. And that will make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
Anyway, Flirty, the first thing to decide is why you want to move. If you are happy with blogspot.com then stick with it. If something’s not broken, don’t fix it. Self hosting will cost you money. It may not be much depending on how you go about it, but blogspot.com is free.
Okay. So you really do want to move. Grand so. The next step is to purchase your domain. I used Register365. There are many others. For example, Register.ie. Do a Google search. Some will be cheaper than others. (Maybe some reader can offer advice on selecting a registration service).
What type of domain would you like? .com, .net, .ie and so on. I had a preference for either .com or .ie but went for .com for two reasons: .com is cheaper! It cost’s me €9 per year plus VAT whereas .ie is about €70 plus VAT. Also, .ie requires a lot more paperwork. You have to prove you are eligible for one by posting off a bunch of documents. I could possibly have afforded it financially, but I just didn’t have the patience to take on the bureaucracy and wait ages for the domain to go live.
Registering primalsneeze.com was painless with Register365. Within hours it was live. By the way, I paid for 5 years in advance. Be careful about this - some registers will not warn you in time you that you need to renew your subscription and some nasty type could come along and hijack your domain. The dog has promised to nip my ankle on 21 April, 2012 to remind me. I just hope he doesn’t forget. Maybe I should get a pet elephant instead.
Another thing to bear in mind when buying a domain is that the purchaser’s name and other details are automatically made public. Bang goes your anonymity. To get around this you could have someone, or some company, act on your behalf. The snag with this is it could cost, plus they may be viewed as the legal owners of the domain. A really cute-hoor method would be to do what Twenty Major (being an extremely cute hoor) did and use the services of a proxy registration outfit. Similar to getting someone to act on your behalf, almost 100% guarantee of remaining anonymous and almost legal.
The next step is to select a company to host your site. I went for Hosting365 for a number of reasons. As pointed out by Tom Raftery via Kav, they will host your blog for free for 1 year. After that, they may charge. If the dog says the fee is too much I’ll just move. It’s up to him though.
Right. Just stop clicking on all those links and listen! You can come back to them later.
Okay. Grand. I’ll continue. Now bear in mind that what Hosting365 say on the blog for free page is not totally correct. They don’t actually provide WordPress for you. You’ll have to organise that yourself. More on this below.
Another reason I went for 365 is that Hosting365 = Register365. Same company. So I figured the process of getting the domain and having it assigned to a host would go more smoothly. It did. A bunch of emails arrived with passwords and links explaining (most of) what I needed to know.
The main advantage with 365 for me is that my ISP buys their broadband service from them. So for all intents and purposes I have a direct connection to my site, which makes editing so much faster. A skip and a jump instead of a Grand National-esque effort of getting to a server in the US.
So now you have your domain and you have it assigned to a host. From this point, until your blog is actually up and running, things get messy in a techie kind of way. If you aren’t willing to read lots of help pages, aren’t comfortable with the thought of having to create a database and other tricky webby things or aren’t up to figuring out stuff as you go along, well call your mate, the geek and have them take over. If you don’t know a geek, the nice folks over at WordPress have a solution: They will do it all for you! Isn’t that great? You just give them the link to your host’s control panel, your login name and password, and a little time and they will install WordPress for you.
As Flirty claims not be a techie I’m going to assume she will use her local friendly geek or the free install service. I will not go through all the geek stuff about doing it yourself. I can later if anyone’s interested.
Okay. WordPress is now up and running. What’s left to do? A few things..
The main/obvious thing is to bring all your old posts and comments over from blogspot.com. This can be painful. To my knowledge, blogspot.com has no export facility. There are hacks to get around this but then we’re back to needing a geek. Maybe someone knows an easy way to do this. Do ya? Huh?
In my case I had already moved from Blogspot.com to WordPress.com. WordPress.com has a facility where you just plug in yout blogspot.com URL and your login details for it, and WordPress goes off and imports if for you. Moving from WordPress.com to the new site was easy as WordPress.com does have a export facility. Just download to your machine. Go to your new site and import.
So an easy workaround might be to set-up a WordPress.com temporarily. Note that you may need to manually enter your links, but you can leave that until the new site is working rather than entering them in the temporary WordPress.com blog.
I getting tired so I’m going to finish up now. I’ll add more later when I think of it. But before I go just one last thing: If you want to use a different template or fancy plugins you are going to have to learn how to use your host’s control panel to upload them. This is something I will definitely add more info on later.
Oh, and another last thing: Make sure the templates you use are compatible with the version of WordPress you installed (or had installed). I made this mistake and comments got placed under the wrong posts. Very funny reading them, but not really the point.
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