Posted by When I set up this personal website in January 2007 here at ruthstalkerfirth.com, I used the same hosting service which I was using for my company. When I wrapped up my company and that domain, I kept this domain and I kept on blogging. I love blogging.
Over the years, as my hosting company offered me all sorts of new services, upgrades and automatic installations that I didn’t really need, and whilst full of possibilities, as I never say never, the end result was that it started taking me more and more time to maintain my site, because we didn’t really map onto each other.
Last time I rang them to find out why the SSL wasn’t working again and making my website look dodgy, I had to choose from the telephone options of being a company with a) 100 employees or less, or b) more than 100 employees. Being neither of these, I saw that perhaps I was no longer their target user group. The final straw was this summer when they ‘improved’ things again so that each time I published a blog, I had to log into my cpanel and flush the cache so that it would appear on my website.
It was time to move on.
I wondered: Should I go full AWS? Use their pay-as-you-go LightSail? What about Google? Finally, I decided for blogging I needed something a bit simpler. So…
Earlier this week I swapped to WordPress.com.
Migrating ruthstalkerfirth.com to WordPress
I blog on WordPress.
Why not use a hosting service designed around the main thing I love to do online?
I signed up and logged in, but of course given how long I’ve been blogging with WordPress via different apps and many different ways over the years, I soon got into a bit of a tangle with various user IDs and passwords which have been automatically saved.
As I was being guided through by one of WordPress’s Happiness Engineers in a chat, I said whilst pressing a big blue button: Do you want me to press this big blue button? They said No. Lucky for me, it was me opting into their migration service which moved everything from my old site hosting service to WordPress, 24 hours later my site was migrated and up and running.
Then came the message telling me to point my domain to my new site which I did. I should have done my backups first before clicking that button as I was part way through when the DNS redirected so I got logged out of my cpanel of my old site downloading files and can’t get back in. I took a deep breath and thought: Well, if I haven’t used any of those files in five years, I’m happy to have them wiped.
Once I untangle my logins here, I will hopefully be blogging, business as usual, in a simpler way, just me blogging on WordPress, no flushing the cache on the cpanel, no SSL certification, no rickety installation. I will lose everything else outside of my WordPress blog installation including some micro sites and files and pages but it’s time to let them go.
And here we are, it’s Christmas Eve. I’m here tapping this on the app on my phone mainly as a test, which is why I’m lying by the Christmas tree, watching the lights twinkle.
I’m so happy to have ticked this migration off my 2026 to-do list. I might even explore some new designs, as this theme and my tweaks to it must be over eight-years old. Though I’m guessing it’s going to take me a while to figure out the new interface as I’ve had a couple of errors messages due to permissions which I will add to the list of things I need to ask a Happiness Engineer next time I talk to one. I can also explore old and new plugins, sort out my newsletter and reinstate comments too. Exciting times!
So far, this new setup suits me better as I’ve said before, when I write a blog I think for ages, make a picture for the top of the blog, type some notes and ideas, then I blog, come back, blog some more, edit it and then finally publish. Later on I reread it on my phone and if there’s any last typos, I sort those out too. I’m thinking I might just enjoy this new WordPress adventure. Less maintenance, more blogging and lying about.
Okay, let’s see what happens when I press publish!