I went self hosted!

I’ve been thinking about migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org for the longest time and finally after saving up a bit and watching countless tutorials and reading numerous blog posts, I took a plunge and went self host. You can read more about the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org here.

Good morning from Nagoya, Japan. It’s currently 10 AM here and the temperature is 17 degree Celcius. Yes, I checked, because doing laundry on a possibly rainy day is not a mistake I would want to repeat. I’ve been settling into new routines these days and if you haven’t noticed, your girl just went self hosted! Like finally!

I love WordPress.com, it covers all the basics and packed with many handy features for your blog. But unfortunately I can’t keep up with the price and limited functions. So I asked around and decided to go self host, considering the price and how flexible I can go with my own site.

Here are the steps to migrate from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

1. Save up some money.

Nothing is free(sigh), so what I did was look up at the pricing of web hosting sites and compare their pricing. There are many web hosting website such as Bluehost, Shinjiru and NetKL. You might want to consider the price of:

•  hosting, disk space and bandwidth (ANNUALLY)
• additional fee, privacy protection etc (ANNUALLY)
• website theme (free themes are available too) (ONE-TIME PURCHASE)

My budget for the first time was around RM250 and the actual cost was less than that. Phew.

You can survey the offers and compare them before purchasing. The do special offers sometimes during holiday or sale season. Take your time *wink

2. Purchase a hosting. After surveying for million years, I purchased my hosting from NetKL. There are a few packages to choose from depending on how much space and bandwidth you want. Usually they will put together an instruction or a tutorial on the setup configuration, so follow.them.carefully.

3. Export your old posts. If you want to bring your posts from old wordpress.com, you have to export them into a file. There are tons of post on migrating your wordpress.com posts to your new shiny self hosted blog. Migration is not limited to wordpress.com only, you can also migrate from Blogger or other blooging sites. Don’t stress! I made a blog post to read whenever I get stressed out, read it HERE.

4. Install plugins. Now your website is up and running, next important thing is installing plugins. Different from wordpress.com, you can choose your plugins freely and install them depending on the compatibility to your website. You can read up on the ‘must-have’ plugins here.

5. Write away! Now the basic build of the site is all set, you can customize it however you like it and start writing. There are free and paid wordpress theme but you can always adjust to your budget.

I’m still new to this so there are so much more to learn. For now I’m currently satisfied apart from minor customization stuff to get into later. Would you migrate to a self hosted blog or maintain your current blog? Let me know!

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Thank you for reading