My Thoughts on Migrating to Self-Hosted Wordpess

There’s a few changes that I want to make on my blog that I still haven’t gotten around to do because of various reasons.

I’m all about perfecting and getting my blog to look like how I pictured it in my head but the limitation on financial and technical skills needed to make it happened tied my hands and backed me up into a dark corner where I feel clueless and helpless.

Self-hosted WordPress blog

I know you can always put google to a good use because everything you need to know is basically there but wouldn’t it be easier to have a tech savvy to deal with the technical part of your blog? No, I’m not talking about Blogger.com because you definitely can handle the technical thingamajig by yourself.

I’m talking about if I were to migrate to other platforms that needed me to fork out extra money for hosting and such, would I be able to handle it? Wouldn’t I freak out if my blog has so much as downtime? I would cry unicorn tears.

I have been itching to migrate to a self-hosted WordPress blog for a few months now. The RM60 annual fee for hosting + domain from Netkl.com is such a bargain where I’m already paying 3/4 of that amount for my domain name. Only RM15 more — it wouldn’t hurt, would it?

The problem is migrating all of my posts from Blogger to WordPress and having them relinked and redirected to the ‘new place’. I know that you can hire people to do that for you but that’s more money I’m not keen on spending so you basically have no choice but to do it yourself.

But that isn’t the confusing part. The confusing part is I am clueless on whether I have to pay more because my domain and hosting are separate.

If I chose to migrate and get the domain + hosting package, do I get to keep erinazmir.com or do I have to get a new domain? I probably need to get in touch with the provider regarding this matter but what the heck I’m just going to mention it here, anyway.

WordPress templates are expensive

You can get away with a darn cute Blogger template for RM20 from Etsy like the template I’m using now but WordPress templates are bloody expensive.

The nicer ones are all RM100++ and above and thinking of me and my excessive habit of tweaking and changing templates, spending hundreds on templates is going to hurt my wallet and myself. Mind you that I’m still a student with no income. I’m still leeching off of my parents.

I got my eyes on a few templates from Pipdig which are Aquae and Aruba Nights; and Satine and Madeira from Kotryna Bass Design. Such beautiful templates! Too bad the currency is unforgiving. What a shame.

Disqus comment system

I want so bad to install Disqus on my blog but the problem is they do not support Blogger comments anymore so I will lose all of my previous comments if I were to install Disqus as my new comment system.

Disqus needs you to sign in before you can leave comment on blogs who have it installed and knowing that Disqus is not widely used in my country, I’m still on the fence about installing it.

Disqus is much easier, I can promise you that. Whenever someone replies to your comment, you will get an email notification unlike Blogger who keeps sending me “Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently.” Oh just shut up already.

I love using Bloglovin’ to follow blogs and Disqus and self-hosted WordPress but the thing is none of them are being used widely by the bloggers in my country.

95% of my Bloglovin’ followers are foreigners and if I had Disqus installed on my blog I’m pretty sure I get zero to none comment for each of my posts. As much as I love all of those, the interaction between blogger and readers is much more important to me.

What do you think about this?