My Journey To Being Self Hosted

I promised to do a post about switching to self hosted, so here goes.

Firstly, I have to say the process was nowhere near as bad as I expected it be. That’s not to say the air wasn’t blue round me quite a lot, I just think I had blown the process up out of all proportion.

I would say around 80% of it went smoothly, exactly how it was supposed to go. In fairness, of the other 20%, all of it was my own fault except one part. I still can’t fathom out what was up with that.

Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself!

I had debated going self hosted a lot over the months leading up to it, and one day I realized if I didn’t do it soon, I probably wouldn’t do it at all. I finally set a date about 6 weeks ahead and started telling people so I couldn’t back out.

The first thing I decided to do was have a little look around for a domain name. I was really lucky that the first site I tried had the exact one I wanted, and it was a real bargain too. I snapped it up there and then. Imagine how gutting it would have been to go back later and it have been taken.

This is one area where I think I had it a lot easier. When I purchased the domain name, I wanted to use it straight away, but I resisted the temptation. So when I set up here, all I had to do was change the DNS address rather than transfer it in. So instead of taking three days and having downtime, it was just a matter of waiting until I was all set up then putting the divert on the old blog.

Day One

I had already done a bit of research, and I knew I wanted to use Bluehost as my host site and then use WordPress through there. This is where it started to go wrong.

I selected the options I wanted on Bluehost, entered my details and it rejected my card, saying insufficient funds. Cue a lot of effing and blinding about how technology is meant to make life easier and this stupid thing can’t even access a payment properly.

Then I realized I hadn’t actually gotten around to transferring the money to the account. Oops!

Achievement level: 0

Stress level: 2

Day Two

With the money transferred, I ventured off to Bluehost again. The purchasing part was really easy and took about 5 minutes to fully complete. I then installed WordPress, again this worked easy and took minutes.

Then came the part that I still haven’t worked out what went wrong.

Bluehost sets up your user name and asks you to set a password. The password has to be 6 characters minimum, have upper and lower case letters, and at least one number and one symbol. I entered a password that was 14 characters long, and had all of the components but it wouldn’t accept it.

I tried various combinations, and eventually gave up and let them choose me one. Not a huge deal, but I will never be able to remember it.

I then went off and exported all my posts from my old blog, and installed the plugin to import them at this end. The import wouldn’t work. After about an hour, I gave up as I was so peed off. At this point, I was ready to call it a day and go back to the old platform.

Achievement level: 3

Stress level: 8

Day Three

Coming back to the problem with a fresh mind, I tried the import again and it still wouldn’t work.

I decided it was time to consult Google (Google was my saviour through all of this).

I found a different plugin, installed it and used that one. This was a good find as I didn’t even need my exported files, it took everything direct from Blogger so all my posts where (mostly) formatted ok and all the images and comments came across correctly positioned.

It was around now that I realised the first plugin didn’t work because after installing it, I had failed to press activate. Duh!

Achievement level: 6

Stress level: 1

Day Four

When I was researching, I had already decided that I wasn’t ready to have a go at building my own theme (maybe next year).

I popped over to Etsy and had a look. I knew I wanted minimalist, black and white as my theme because one of the things I came to hate about my old site was the way it was kind of cartoony looking.

I found a theme I loved (another bargain) and purchased it.

I then tried to upload it to WordPress, and it kept telling me the CSS style sheet was missing.

I turned back to my friend Google, and learned an awful lot about what CSS is and how it works, but not where I could find a style sheet. With very few options left, I contacted the Etsy seller, and basically admitted that I was clueless and asked where I could find this style sheet.

She replied really quickly. The style sheet was there all along, I hadn’t unzipped the file. Duh! (Are you starting to see a pattern here?).

She was really lovely and managed to not add duh to the end of her message. She even said to contact her again if I got stuck.

So that done, I went off to try again and the upload was successful, however, it wasn’t showing up in available themes. I decided it was too technical and went and chose, and successfully displayed, a standard WordPress theme.

Achievement level: 7

Stress level: 6

Day Five

Again, with a fresh mind, I decided to re-tackle the problem of why the theme I had installed wasn’t showing up in available themes.

I found a lot of forums where other people had the same problem, and the answers all started with checking through the control panel on Bluehost to check they were there. I did that and it was there.

The settings all looked the same as the others that where showing up. When going through and checking the settings where all correct, it was then I noticed that there was the same number of themes in Bluehost as there was in WordPress. I cross referenced them and discovered it had been there all along – the theme name was different to the file name.

Once I found that out, changing the theme was easy. I then filled in all the details I wanted on my side bar (except my grab badge) and had a play about with the menu bar.

Then came the fun bit.

A full re-design of my blog’s header and badge. I generated new codes for the linky grab badges too as the old ones didn’t work over here (I expected that). I added all the new design elements, and finally, the blog was looking how I wanted it to.

Achievement level: 8

Stress level: 1

Day Six

I knew day six was going to be a mammoth task. Again this was my own fault entirely.

About two months after starting the first blog, I decided to add Google Analytics. There’s an easy way to install this on Blogger, you add a line of pre-generated code to your template’s HTML and that’s it done.

Or there’s the hard way. Each time you write a post or a page, you copy and paste a bit of coding into it. At this point on my blog journey, I wasn’t confident enough to even think about messing about with the main HTML so I opted for the hard way.

It really wasn’t that bad, I pasted it onto a sticky note on my desktop and just added it to each post before hitting publish.

Now the problem occurred because the HTML is different for a Blogger blog and a WordPress blog, so WordPress recognised it as text to display rather than coding, so each post had a rather unsightly bit of code displayed at the end.

Day six was spent going into each post and page and individually editing each one to remove it. I thought scheduling tweets was bad until I did this.

It was a long process, but it was a necessary evil so I just got on with it. It took about three hours.

Achievement level:9

Stress level: 0 (not stressful, just mind numbingly boring)

Day Seven

This was the day that I was looking forward to. Re-launch day.

First, I went through all my social media networks and updated the headers and profile pictures to my new ones, plus amended all the links (I missed one on Twitter, thanks to Prabs for pointing it out).

I then went back to Blogger and added the redirect code.

I added a few plugins I liked the idea of, and that was it, all done and time for re-launch.

Achievement level: 10

Stress level: 0

When I announced I would be offline for a week, I thought it might be a bit long, it was actually perfect, nothing was rushed and it meant when I hit a snag, I didn’t have to panic as much and could leave it and come back later.

Overall, it was stressful, but totally worth it.

I was going to add some tips for making the process easier, but I think this post is already long enough, maybe too long, so check back tomorrow for those, and check back later in the week for my thoughts on how Blogger and WordPress measure up against each other 🙂

Have you completed this process? Did you want to scream? Are you thinking of making the jump? Let me know in the comments 🙂

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