Why I switched from Godaddy (WordPress.org) to WordPress.com
by guest blogger Brad of canadiantechblogger.com
For those who are unaware of it, I recently moved my tech blog canadiantechblogger to WordPress.com free hosting.

The first question is why would I do such a thing?

Continual frustrations, annoyances and poor value for my money

I switched from my old hosting provider (Godaddy), to WordPress.com because Godaddy was giving me issues every other week, or had caching issues, and did not support gzip (fully) etc. Plus the $5/month I was paying was not worth it.

With my web hosting renewal date a month away I did an assessment of where I was at, where the blog was at, and what my stats indicated about my readership.

On a web hosted WordPress.ORG install my blog was  like a stand alone island. By moving my blog content  free hosting at  WordPress.com and having them domain map to it my blog and I could be  part of a community and that provides opportunities to promote my blog more effectively.

On a web hosted WordPress.ORG install I not only had web hosting problems to cope with but I also had to do my own WordPress and plugin updates and solve any technical problems that arose on my own. Although these were not a  challenge for me,  the fact that Staff do all the updates and solve all  technical problems on free hosted WordPress.com blogs that cannot be solved by the volunteers who answer questions on the support forums was very attractive.

WordPress.com is better for my blog

I am glad I moved to WordPress.com (with timethief’s advice!). I could have moved my blog to blogger, but I like wordpress.com better.

WordPress.com has a much better community. People can find your blog via tags and categories on the WordPress.com global tag pages,  related posts, or even the homepage! Blogger doesn’t offer any of that.

The switchover and clean up

‘Yes’ the switch was easy (for the most part). It was a simple export of my blog contents  via the tools menu in my wordpress.org install and an import into my wordpress.com blog.  However,  I quickly realized that I had over 200 posts with videos to convert as wordpress.com does not supporting HTML embeds and uses a shortcode instead.  It took me over 6 hours to do it, but its all done.  :) With all the post converts I was able to remove 17 dead end posts, and about 80 dead links.

I also noticed that Google Analytics, Woopra, Wibya, Widgets, etc. would not work due to code restrictions. But that’s fine as the in-house WordPress stats program is perfect on its own (hence why it was made).

I am also not allowed to have any advertising on WordPress.com which is fine as, unless you make to the front of Digg/Reddit/etc.  you won’t make anything much when it comes to income. I am perfectly fine with wordpress.com adding its own advertising when it needs to.

Conclusion

I no longer have to pay $5/month for hosting, don’t have to worry about backups or downtime, bandwidth limits, loading time/issues, and I don’t have to worry about hackers.

All I need to pay is $25 a year to pay for domain mapping ($10 @ wordpress.com), and domain renewal costs ($15 @ godaddy).

So I am saving $35+ a year, and at the same time supporting the best blogging community.  :)

I had a few blogging casualties though. CTB games, GWasurans, forums, wiki, etc where removed but that’s fine since they where ghost-towns.

I host my gaming review blog, and software review blog here on WordPress.com since I created them, so I am really getting my moneys worth.  :).

Overall it was worth it. Great community, and care free hosting are well worth a few hours of converting, and paying a few dollars per year.

Related posts found in this blog:

Bloggers Get Your Own Domain

Self-hosting: What’s Your Hurry?