Ask a Blogger: Moving to WordPress & Changing Hosts (Our Experiences)

You’ve been blogging awhile.  You want to change hosts.  You decide to take the plunge.  Fear sets in.  You know you lack the knowledge or experience to transition yourself but the price of paying someone seems out of reach.  What do you do?  As two bloggers that have recently moved from blogger to wordpress or changed hosts, we’ll let you in on a little secret.  We had no idea what we were doing either.

Dana’s Experience:

After about a year of blogging, I decided to move from blogger to wordpress.  I was lucky that another blogger was kind enough to offer how much the move cost her.  I was shocked!  Could I afford to do this?  The frugal in me briefly considered trying to move the site myself.  Luckily, I realized it was worth the cost when I factored in my time, effort & sanity. 

My best advice is to ask for recommendations from other bloggers.  Find out who other bloggers used for their move and what their experiences were.  Don’t take the advice of 1 individual and don’t go for the cheapest option.  My site transition had lots of hiccups, but in the end I had a site hosted by Host Gator & only a few gray hairs.  However, I lost my Google Friend Connect & my Google Analytics.  I had to start both over from scratch.  I also didn’t realize how long my site would be down or how long feeds would take to pick back up.

Don’t even get me started on how I felt when I opened up my new wordpress dashboard to write my first post.  I was in tears asking why I did this to myself.  I had no idea how to use wordpress.  I had no idea about using HTML or CSS.  A plugin? What’s that? 

I spent countless hours & sleepless nights searching for answers.  It’s been a couple of months now and I’m still learning.  I’ve learned that wordpress is completely worth the stress & expense.  I’ve learned to not be stubborn and to ask for help after searching online for hours to no avail.  I’ve learned to be grateful to all the ladies that gave me advice.  I’ve learned that I want to help others by posting what it took me months to figure out.  Stay tuned…

Amee’s Experience:

I did it. I moved. I moved my word press blog to a new host. I have to say my move was like most people’s moves I lost some stuff. I gained some stuff. I mostly gained about $75 a month and a lot of information that I never thought I would need to know. The first thing I learned was hire someone to do this for you. I bothered my poor almost brother in law to help me. He deserves a huge gold star. I have since learned that this service typically cost about $120. I asked Moritz Fine Design if they gave free estimates and they do. If I did this move thing over again I would hire them to look at my site to determine what I need. I know I bought the best package on Host Gator but I know for a fact I over bought for the needs of my site. I wanted to be safe but really I am throwing away money. I figured after a couple of months I will have them evaluate what I am using to determine if another plan fits my needs better. This will save me tons of money since I will only be buying what I need.

A typical migration for a website would be:

Move Website Files
Move Database
Change domain and DNS
The cost is usually $120.00
If you need to migrate your emails it will be more

I received a free move with Host Gator which is great but what I didn’t know is a s soon as they say the move is done look at your site. They mean it. I left that email in my box and kept on blogging until the weekend. This resulted in the content that I wrote staying on my old IP address. I had to beg my brother in law to download and upload the content that was on the other site. I lost some of my printable lists. I also lost a lot of the changes I made to the site design. I saw a lag in my rss feed and I believe that it was not delivered for a day. I spent countless hours trying to figure out where to point what to get what I needed. I pointed my domain prior to moving things over which left me without a site and a small heart attack then I figured out I needed to download stuff so I pointed them back to the server and did the download. If you have no idea what I am talking about spend the $120.00 it is well worth it.

What were your experiences moving to wordpress or changing hosts?