Hosting My Web Blog

Posted by Troy on October 27, 2008 under Web | Be the First to Comment

This blog used to be hosted by WordPress up until about a week ago.  The blog was called troyscott.wordpress.com.   The WordPress site was great.  Number one its free and WordPress is fairly easy to use and very configurable.   But there were some drawbacks having it on the WordPress site like using Feed Burner and Google AdSense.

So I decided host my own WordPress site.   About a year ago I signed up with Host Papa which came with the following features:

  • 10 add-on domains
  • 100 MySQL databases
  • 1 TB of storage
  • Fantasico (software installer that comes with cPanel)

Last month I registered my site name for about $20  with domain.ca.  Last week I finally spent some time to transferring my blog from troyscott.WordPress.com to troyscott.ca.   In order to do this I needed to export my current blog data from troyscott.wordpress.com and supply the named server info to domain.ca.  You can export the blog by logging onto the WordPress Dashboard and then select Manage>Export:

Export blog

Download the file to you local machine.   Before  I imported my old blog to troyscott.ca I used Fantasico to set up the WordPress blog application.  I could of installed this myself and I won’t know if using Fantasico was a good idea until I try to upgrade my site to a newer release of WordPress.  But if you want to get your blog up and running quickly or you are not comfortable installing the blog software your server I recommend using a product like Fantasico.  In a matter of minutes my blog was up an running.  Of course you can only use Fantasico if your web server provider has cPanel.

Once my blog was up and running I had an important decision to make.  Do I keep my original blog on WordPress and simply re-direct the traffic to my new site or do I delete my old site.  Well in my case I decided to delete my old site.   However, the only reason I did this is that my old site had very low traffic (mostly do to the lack of blog posts and not SEO) and I wanted to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).   In fact when my site was hosted at WordPress.com my SEO was very good.   If your site already has a lot of traffic and subscribers I would leave it up and  just include a post stating that your blog has moved.

Now its time to customize the site and focus on SEO and Google AdSense and most importantly its time to start blogging.

Troy

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