I need a new home!

You may have noticed my blog is all jacked up. Yeah, it's fun huh? It has something to do with some disease or something with my web hosting. It's some gibberish I don't understand, but the bottom line is I need a new place to host this thing. I've been a crappy blogger lately, but I'm not giving up. It'd be easy to do right now - say screw it. But I want to find Doahleigh a new home and keep it going.

I need your help though. I started this blog when I was dating a computer/internet whiz, and he's maintained it for me ever since, even two years after we broke up. So I know NOTHING about how to find a web host or how to move all my content over or anything - I don't even know what I don't know.

The first step is to find a place to host this site. What do you guys use? What's good? What's affordable? I've heard godaddy is cheap, but I'm not sure I can tolerate the name. I thought about Wordpress, but I don't want it to be a .wordpress.com blog and I can't figure out how that works. Anyone know?

I feel completely naive, it's embarrassing. Please help!

Comments

[Dori]

I use go daddy and have been pretty happy with it. However, I have an internet expert friend who linked it with the domain name, not sure how easy it would be to do on my own. Their customer service is great, though ... probably worth looking into.

[A.]

I'm totally doing this right now too! I've been really looking into Wordpress, and if you pay a small fee, I believe you can use your current domain name (not .wordpress.com), have multiple pages, etc. I, too, would want to transfer everything over there, and I'm not sure how... but if I research it enough and figure it out, I'll let you know!

[willikat]

Hi! I might have some advice for you. If you buy a domain name,through godaddy or something else (I have heard supergreenhosting.com is great), then you can use that with your WordPress blog. You can also have your WP pages customized so you can still have links pages or about pages or whatever you want. Now, I have no idea how to get those extra pages, but I know it's possible partly because so many popular bloggers use WP as a platform. (Sundry is an example.)

That explains why the last couple times (though not this time) when I tried to go to your page I got an alarmist "possible attack site!" warning...

Good luck and let me know if I can be of any meager help.

[Brad]

Here's the news: I have been hosting doahleigh for the past few years, and recently my host has been subject to an attacker who has wrecked pretty much every Wordpress blog on their servers. I've had about 5 different websites go down because of this.

So, unfortunately I think it's best of doahleigh moves on. wordpress.com is great, and your domain name will work on it (I can help you do this.) But you can't have your ads on there. That's the biggest drawback. They only allow blogs who pull in about 10,000 pageviews a month to have ads. I don't think doahleigh is up there just yet.

You can look at other blogging services like Typepad (http://www.typepad.com/) or Squarespace (http://www.squarespace.com/) or even Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.com/). I'd seriously look at Tumblr, a lot of bloggers are switching to that, and yes you can use your own domain name.

I apologize for your website having these problems, but it's been super frustrating to stay ahead of the attacks. Better to have a huge company backing you up than your infamous ex-boyfriend haha

[Shannon]

Thanks Brad. I'm going to bug you for a little help...

[MonsteRawr]

I use godaddy for hosting and Wordpress for publishing, and I've been extremely happy with both. I have complete freedom and control over my content, and godaddy's customer service is surprisingly great. But the part I like best is the fact that nowhere on my site does it say who I'm hosted by. It's all me, baby!

[Brad]

The problem isn't the host, really. It's keeping up with Wordpress updates and any occasional support needs that arise. I use Media Temple which is actually phenomenal, but it's too expensive for one person to host one site at. doahleigh is 1 of about 10 different websites I am hosting through there right now. And doahleigh gets more of my attention than many of those do.