Why have I moved my blog?
You may have noticed that the web address of this blog has changed!
Ever since I started this blog around 6 years ago, I have used WordPress via their free hosted offering at wordpress.com
It’s worked well enough for me, but since then I have become quite au fait with self-hosted WordPress and the power and flexibility that it gives. I use self-hosted WordPress on several other sites that I own, and have a web hosting package that allows me to host a number of websites.
Up until now, I’ve kept the Hay Llamas blog at wordpress.com out of inertia, despite owning the domain name hayllamas.com, but recently I have felt that WordPress spam you, my visitors, with way too much advertising. I don’t see a penny of that advertising either.
With a free package on wordpress.com, I can only install the themes that WordPress allows me to, I can’t modify them (apart from whatever modification options the theme creator provides), I have no access to plugins other than the ones that WordPress provides, and I am limited to 2GB of space. Also, WordPress could take my blog down with no warning or reason. Plus, they are free to insert their own adverts into my content, adverts which I have no control over.
With self-hosted WordPress I have complete control over themes, I can install whichever plugins I wish, I can do SEO if I want to, do redirects, and the only adverts that are shown are ones that I put there (if I so wish, although I have no plans to do so). My storage is only limited by my web host (and is shared over all my sites), and I have complete control over my content.
So, I was faced with three choices.
- Keep things as they are.
- Pay WordPress £36 per year to remove the advertising (but still be very restricted on plugins – I’d need to pay £240 per year if I wanted that)
- Move this blog to a self-hosted WordPress installation on my web host and pay WordPress £11 per year to redirect all traffic to it.
I’ve gone for option #3, and before I made the decision to move I had a test site running here into which I imported all posts. The migration looks like it has been a success, with all posts and comments coming over fine. However, post “likes” haven’t come across.
How you are affected.
Hopefully, you won’t be. You should be redirected here automatically. All comments have been retained, but it seems that “likes” have not come across unfortunately. 🙁
Subscriptions and follows may or may not continue to work. I don’t know. It may be worth you re-subscribing.
I will pay for the redirects service for 1, maybe 2 years, after which I will delete all content from the wordpress.com site and leave only a single post redirecting people to here.