by 
A Brand New Day!
It’s a brand new day, and I now have a brand new virtual home. The new logo is a picture standing on the front porch of my real home when the sky looked absolutely amazing and inspiring. I guess that’s one of the reasons I decided to use it as my new website’s logo background.
I wasn’t originally planning on moving my website, nor was I planning on writing a post about switching where I host it, but I went through so much, in such a short time, to end up where I am right now that I felt it was worth walking through it.
What Did I Just Do?
Someone that works for me, Ed, recently decided to start writing a blog of his own. I have no idea if my last post about my workflow was a catalyst of any kind, but he and I started to go through what I have been working on about my workflow and the apps that I use. He got hosting for his WordPress blog through Bluehost and started building that out.
We started talking about different plugins you can add to WordPress and also spoke about the need to be able to preview changes to your site before you publish them live. My main issue was that I didn’t like the theme I was using, and the “Personal” paid plan through WordPress.com has a lot of restrictions that Ed didn’t have with his site through Bluehost. Also, Ed was able to get his website for less than what I paid for my WordPress.com site! That made me start looking at options for my site… and that’s where this adventure began.
Why Change At All?
I only just landed on WordPress.com, and even more recently paid for two years of their “Personal” plan. Why would I decide I needed to leave all of a sudden? Well, as I said above, I wanted to make some changes. I wasn’t happy with my site, and I’m starting to get into this blogging thing. There were too many restrictions on my WordPress.com site plan, and the upgrade to the next level, which may not have satisfied my wants and needs anyway, was more than double what I already paid. The fact that Ed didn’t have those restrictions and paid less made me curious to look.
So, primarily, two things were driving me to find something else:
- More choice, control, and customizations
- Price for those things (I make $0 off my blog, so cost matters)
My domain registrar for a few years now has been Namecheap. As their name says, you can get domains for pretty cheap. They aren’t as cheap as they used to be a few years ago, but they are still reasonable. I used to have my site hosted on one of their shared hosting plans, but when it came time to renew, I wasn’t blogging at that time and couldn’t justify spending that money on something I didn’t use. I looked around for something free because I didn’t want to lose what I had out there… no matter how little it was. I found WordPress.com had a free plan and signed up. I was able to transfer all my stuff there, and life was good for a while.
Anyway, since I had used Namecheap shared hosting before, I figured I would see what they were charging. They had a special for only $18 for the first year! SOLD! I signed up and quickly imported my stuff from WordPress.com. As I was trying to set things up and test stuff out, I was noticing that my site was taking forever to load. Which browser I used made some difference, but in all cases, it was at least twice as slow as the same content, images, and theme that was being served up over on WordPress.com.
In some cases, my Namecheap hosted site was taking 14 seconds to load fully, while the WordPress.com site was fully loading in around 1 second (or less)! This was no good.
What Went Wrong?
I spent time optimizing my site, reducing image sizes, and even set up a caching plugin to help speed things up. I got on with Namecheap support, but they said everything looked great on their side. They even ran a report that tests the loading speed of websites, and it was coming back as an A+. We also used that same test to look at my site on WordPress.com, and it came back as a C-/D. Yet, whenever I would try to load either site, the load times were drastically different in the opposite direction!
Ed to the rescue — I was complaining to Ed about all of this because I was going insane. Ed ran some ping tests and also found a site that looked at latency. He ran these tests between both of my websites and the latency of the Namecheap hosted site was in the hundreds of milliseconds, and even saw 7% packet loss, while the WordPress.com was barely above 8 milliseconds. I then went back to the site that provided the reports and looked at the waterfall report… this showed a ton of latency too, but once things responded for the Namecheap hosted site, things loaded quickly due to my optimizations.
I was only like 24 hours into having purchased the Namecheap shared hosting, so I just canceled it and let them know I was not satisfied with the performance at all. They refunded my $18, and I went looking elsewhere.
Because the WordPress.com site performed so well comparatively, I was thinking maybe that extra money for the next-level-up plan on WordPress.com was worth it. But then I did some other tests.
What Went Right?
I decided to do some ping tests of my own. I did it against WordPress.com and Ed’s Bluehost site. The Bluehost site had even lower latency (which probably just means it was one hop closer to me than WordPress.com honestly). So, Bluehost should be just as fast as WordPress.com.
I spent a bit of time digging around to gather all of the research I could on the best sites to go with, and even quizzed Ed on why he chose Bluehost, how he liked it, and could he do the things with his website that I wanted to do on mine? In the end, I decided to go with their highest priced hosted WordPress offering and bought a 3-year term for $5.45 per month. This plan provides unlimited websites, unmetered storage, and automated backups, among some other things. I own 3 domains currently, so my thought was I could run all of them off my Bluehost account for one low price! I even mentioned to Ed that I might transfer my domains to Bluehost as my new registrar. Ed said to keep them separate, but to me, single-pane-of-glass management is far too appealing. Plus, Bluehost is giving a 60-day money-back guarantee right now, so I had nothing to lose. Ed said he could understand that argument, and it’s one of the primary reasons people choose to go with Nutanix (where we both work).
What Went Wrong Again?
After I bought their plan, I started to dig into setting up my site. I found a new and better theme (IMHO) and imported all of my content. Things were looking awesome, but I was kind of moving too fast for my good. I wasn’t taking my time and looking at everything carefully. For one, my site still wasn’t accessible to the public yet. I figured out why and was able to make things public so that I could get Ed’s opinion on how things looked. I pointed my domain’s name servers to Bluehost, but I still saw some weird “http://box0000.temp.domains” URL scheme for my site. All of my posts were showing this, as well. I figured I would transfer my domain to Bluehost to be the registrar going forward, and maybe that would resolve the URL issues. Again, I was trying to move pretty fast and not researching much.
Then I went to optimize things on my site. I installed the Smush plugin to optimize all of my images. I also installed the W3 Total Cache plugin and activated that. Then I “smushed” all of the images on my site to make page loads even faster. I went to look at what my site looked like, and things were seriously wrong! My website design/theme was all jacked up, and the pages were no longer responsive, meaning the page layout didn’t change anymore based on what size browser window you had (like on mobile. Nothing looked right at all. Even worse, if I tried to get to my site outside of the admin pages, all I would get was a 404 error (not found)… dread set in.
I looked at my site backups… there was only one from when they deployed my naked WordPress site. All of those changes I made over the last several hours weren’t backed up! The next backup wasn’t for another hour or two, and it was like 11 pm at this point. I was in a panic that I just lost all that time, but I figured I would let the next backup happen and see if things started working by morning.
The next morning I woke up super early without an alarm (I think I got up around 5 am). I did a few things, my morning ritual, and then tried to look at my site with only one eye open and my fingers crossed. No change. It was all still F’ed.
I had made up my mind last night that if things were still like this in the morning, I was going to restore from the original backup and start over from scratch. So I hit the restore. It didn’t take long at all to finish, but when I checked out my site, none of my content was there anymore, but it was still all broken! WTF??
So I tried getting on live chat with Bluehost Support. The first person I got was great, and they figured out after like 30-45 minutes that the W3 Total Cache plugin seemed to be causing the problem due to incompatibility or something. They disabled that, and things looked normal again!! I restored the backup from the middle of the night, with all my content, and my site… was broken again! It was just that the plugin was reenabled, so they disabled it again, and things looked good… ish. It wasn’t all roses yet, and that’s when the chat froze up and stopped working. I had to start chat 2 or 3 more times, and I finally gave up. I simply deleted the W3 Total Cache plugin and tried to forge ahead.
I ran into some more problems. Like, my main landing page was resolving and accessible, but NONE of my posts were reachable. I immediately thought that perhaps they weren’t in the correct location compared to where the site thought they should be, so I tried to trash the posts and restore them. This only made things worse since I didn’t permanently delete the posts. So, I permanently deleted everything and restored again. Things were now back the way they should be, but none of the posts were reachable outside of the admin site.
I was going to start another chat but decided to CALL Bluehost support instead. Best decision I made. I got a super helpful guy, fixed the posts not working (my databases were out of sync), and was able to answer all kinds of questions I had and fix a bunch of things I couldn’t figure out on my own. One of those things was that cPanel, which is where the advanced settings are for both my domain and my site, would not work for me. I use Safari as my primary browser, and there is an issue with Safari and cPanel. I opened Chrome and no problems getting to cPanel(yay). I was also able to resolve my domain name URL issues and that fixed all of my posts. I even set up email forwarding!
Happy In The End
In the end, and about 72 hours later, all is well in my blogging world. I even fixed the cross-post reference links in my previous posts to stay within my new site and domain name, as well as edit all of my recent posts on my WordPress.com site to provide messaging that I have moved my website and link to my new hosted site.
It was kind of a crazy and somewhat panicked ride in the last few days, but I am much happier now. I really wanted to get things completed before Monday morning, so I can keep to my schedule of posting on Monday morning, and I wanted to be able to do that on my new site.
Now that things are under control, I will start to look at setting up my other domains with websites on Bluehost. My photography blog might be a little complicated, but I’ll at least start playing around with things.
One Last Thing
Well, I thought I was finished, but when I tried to publish this post from Ulysses, I realized I had to add my new website. However, since I am using a custom WordPress.ORG site on private hosting, instead of WordPress.COM, there were some additional challenges. Basically, it wouldn’t connect and kept telling me that I had incompatible plugins or incorrect login credentials.
I searched a bit and found this web page where Hans Bruins ran into the same issues. I hopped over to the plugin that Hans referenced and tried to decipher the instructions. Luckily, I happened to find some more detailed instructions here, and with that, I was able to get the plugin installed. However, I should have paid closer attention and read all of Hans’ post (are you noticing a trend here?), because he had more explanation that was needed. The most critical piece is that you need to type in the URL path of the file you rename! Once I figured that out I was in, and here we are!
