Goodbye WordPress.com. Hello Bluehost

Short post today.

I’ve been meaning for some time to start the migration of a couple WordPress sites I own and manage from Wordpress.com onto another hosting provider as self-hosted WP sites.

On a the recommendation of a friend who blogs daily, I’ve gone with Bluehost, and migrated all of my blog content for this blog from wordpress.com to a new WordPress instance I’ve created. In all, it probably took me two hours to migrate, configure DNS, and set up the various plugins. I also had a bunch of fun getting my .htaccess file and the Apache ReWriteEngine directives to work right (as this is not the only site I’ll be hosting on bluehost). There is still some stuff to do, namely work on my CSS (my buddy David of Smarter Storytelling is right that WP CSS is intricate).

Hopefully this change over was invisible to you. Let me know in the comments (now powered by Disqus; one of the reasons I wanted to get off WordPress.com is that it allows “widgets” but no plugins such as Disqus) how it’s working. Mike Zamasky’s kick in the butt to get back to blogging gave me a reason to do this migration as well.

Would love to hear what plugins and WP themes you like in the comments as well.

In the coming weeks I’ll probably hook up Cloudflare, but that is probably not urgent right now.