I guess everyone who started a blog with wordpress will some day come to a point where they have to decide whether they want to have a self hosted wordpress blog or not. When I first started my blog a year or two back, I did some reading on which blog to choose before I register one. My research was just brief I guess and I miss out those details. I found out many people reviewing that wordpress is good, flexible and there’s lot to customize. So I decided it was wordpress.
After a year of blogging, as I wanted to change more options to customize, I do realised that wordpress.com is pretty restricted and only limited to the basic essentials. It was then I found out about the differences, there’s wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Since I wanted to customize and having more options for coding and editing CSS, I decided to migrate to from wordpress.com to my self hosted domain using the wordpress engine.
The next thing to decide is which server company provide wordpress web hosting. I check with one of my local (Singapore) tech guy who provided domain server services, he charged about US$215 a year. I decided to find out what’s the price range for some of the those popular web hosting companies online. In my search, I found some hosting suggestion at wordpress.com. Well, only 2 companies caught my attention. It was BlueHost and Go Daddy.
First impression at Go Daddy was an exciting and fun company. Read the products and the pricing they had, all seems reasonably priced and they were all affordable web hosting .
I went on next to have a look at BlueHost web hosting. The Web site feels less exciting as compared to Go Daddy. But what caught my attention more was the product pricing they had. As compared to Go Daddy, BlueHost was slightly cheaper and was an affordable web hosting. But I thought Go Daddy was more fun and exciting, my mind was steering towards Go Daddy, due to the design, marketing style factor, even though it cost a few dollars more than Blue Host.
I found some sites reviewing and commenting their experiences with both of these companies. Seems like Go Daddy had few more negative feedback as compared to BlueHost. Anyway, I tired asking BlueHost a couple of questions about setting up domains and wordpress via their Live Chat. It did leave me with a positive impression and the respond was reasonably fast. I could not find any Live Chat features on Go Daddy site though, that was kind of a turn off if I have to email and ask and wait for the reply. I wanted to ask some more technical question again, BlueHost Live Chat again answered all my questions leaving me satisfied. With a very positive impression left behind, I decided to use BlueHost as my wordpress web hosting provider.
The process of migrating from wordpress.com to my own hosted server has been an exciting process. Did not face with much hiccups, any questions regarding the server, I settled with BlueHost Live Chat, its really helpful. Its like, you have some one to ask questions if you have any problem during your setup. For the migration process from wordpress.com to your sever, Bluehost does not support. After much research and read up, I managed to migrate successfully. I have written a step by step instruction on how to migrate from wordpress.com to wordpress.org here. I hope this is helpful to those who are considering migrating and those who have decided to migrate.
With the good impression and good support even before I signed up, I would recommend BlueHost web hosting to anyone who wants to start off with a simple web site or hosting a wordpress blog site.
