I was thinking about moving on a dedicate hosting since a while, the free wordpress hosting from wordpress.com is good for the first few months, afterwards when you start wanting something more the free account is not good anymore, there are plenty of limitations:
- You cannot setup any custom theme nor modify the existing theme in order to fit your needs, each and every of the free theme I tried had something which I disliked after a while.
- The premium themes are expensive, and again the customization features are limited
- ADs may appear on your page, I don’t like ADs.
- You cannot install all the plugin you want, this feature is not even available with a premium account!
- The dashboard customization possibilities are almost zero!
- Is not possible to upload videos.
- Bla bla
The premium plan is priced 100USD a year, and substantially the only additional features you have are some custom design options (CSS,custom font &c) and some additional themes, you may also upload videos, option not available for the free account.
Not that much for 100USD!
I moved to siteground.com, the cheapest plan cost me 50EUR a year, I may upgrade to an advanced plan (with more bandwidth, DB options &c) for 90EUR. What I have for that money is an hosting service on linux, on which I can no only run wordpress but also my own website.
On my wordpress blog now I can do any customization I want, and if something is not available I can work it down by myself and upload my own code, that’s great! You may have noticed that I changed the theme, I think is much more pleasant now (And its free!), I made some changes to the contact page from where now you can send me messages (that’s was not possible on wordpress.com), and many other small changes are coming in the future!
I write a lot about code on this blog, thanks to a cool coding plugin (not available even with the more expensive plan on wordpress.com) now I can share nice code snippets like this:
#include <iostream>;
int main()
{
std::cout<<"Hello World\n";
return 0;
}
This look much better, don’t you think?
I still have a lot of functionalities to explore on my new blog, perhaps I will make some graphic changes in the future, who knows!
Exporting & Importing
Exporting a blog from wordpress.com is pretty easy, you have a button on your dashboard which redirect you to a tool able to export your whole blog into an XML file! That XML with contain all the information about you blog, from posts to comments, from images to links, &c.
Generating the XML file is easy, importing the XML is a mess!
The process is buggy! Look at the amount of negative comment for the tool, here. That’s crazy, why this tool doesn’t work smoothly like the import counterpart? It took me some effort to have all my stuff working and at the end, sadly I was forced to remove the existing comments, since for some reason after the import procedure those were referring to my old website instead of the new one.
When I first run the importer nothing worked, the output page was blank with no information about the state of the operation, I ran again the importer with the same XML and this time I got some information about different failed operations relate to images from my blog, not sure what to do at this point, I decided to execute the well tested fixing procedure run-the-shit-again-and-again!
Each execution had some errors, but at the end even with all the errors I noticed that the whole blog was properly imported, with all the images &c. It looks this way: each time you run the tool, it will import something then will crash, run it multiple time and it will import all your stuff.
It work… In a little weird way, but still it work..
Many people do not know the run-the-shit-again-and-again procedure, that’s probably because we’re not all programmers, but we may ask for help to wordpress.com! If for some reason you’re not able to import your stuff then look at this:
The free tool is a crap for purpose, you may ask for someone to export and import your blog for only 130USD.
I suspect that the run-the-shit-again-and-again procedure not necessarily always work, reading the comment about the plugin it looks like that many times for bigger blogs the import procedure is just plain broken..
Thanks for reading