My wife got me into this whole blogging thing last year, as she is a fairly active blogger. You can check out her site at sarahsteinerart.com. Tell her I sent you.

Anywho, I originally set up her blog back in 2012 with a Hostmonster site. I have since been lazy and have not maintained it. So today, I finally go around to moving the site over to wordpress.com in order to let the good people at Automattic (the makers of Wordpress) deal with patching, scaling, and backups.

You would think with a service offering that they charge for, that they would make the path from their free software hosted on your own server to their hosted service a smooth one. I can tell you it is not. Some gotchas to watch out for.

  • If you use “www” on the original blog, you wont be on the hosted one. This causes an infinite redirect loop until the DNS catches up (which took a few hours).
  • Media will be linked back to the old site, yet will be served from the Wordpress CDN. Not sure why the links could not be updated also. At least we got to look through the hundreds of blog posts over the past years.
  • Going through each page and making sure it transferred correctly is a chore. Especially when pictures seemed to transfer at random.

We got the site moved over, it is much faster and cleaner now, so perhaps it was not all bad. Next step is to close down the pesky HostMonster account.