Hi everyone

I have a very popular blog that has grown massively in the last few years and I want to move from being hosted by wordpress to self hosted.

I feel this gives me much more control over the content,the widgets and the customisation of the site.

I own the domain, and I want to host it in Australia (unless there is a good reason not to?)

Is there is a guru out there or some good advice to help me do this.I am the most worried obviously about the migration and losing anything in the process, and secondly, any downtime.

I have no advertising and no income from the site apart from a few kind donations yet get massive amounts of visitors.I run the place by myself

Any advice or help would be fantastic in helping me deicide what to do.

I would even take on someone, who is willing to help with the tech side with full credits or an ad or something for their portfolio...

I honestly do not know how these things work as I concentrate on the content of my blog...here is a link to my site (mods can remove if not allowed...)
aussiecriminals.com.au

Thanks for reading...

Cheers
Robbo

Hey Robbo,

Welcome to the forum.

A managed Virtual Dedicated Server is probably the next logical step up from a shared hosting environment.

SIS would be able to provide a free migration service to any of our Cloud VPS servers if you join us for a 12 month term.

Have a look at our website under Cloud VPS, the base level package should be more than enough for a wordpress site.

Feel free to PM me if you need anymore info.

Hi Luke, if I was looking at the right page, its a bit costly for me being a one man show. I get about 10,000 visits a day minimum, but when major crimes happen, it can jump to over 100,000 a day. It is 95% words Id say, with images and video to tell the stories...I have no idea about how much bandwidth I use or need as wordpress.com handles all that...

Thanks for offering to help me out though...What have you got in the cheaper hosting tiers? Cheers

check out Free Domain Names @ HOSTS R US . I have vps hosting with them & im only paying just over20 bucks a month

Robbo,

Quality shared hosting should be more than enough for moving from wordpress.com-hosted to self hosted.

I'd do the maths on your bandwidth usage first to ensure that you have allowed enough, and I'd also install one of the two caching plugins - either WP Supercache or WP Totalcache (Supercache is easier).

Backups could be done with sitebackup.com or with one of the many wordpress plugins that do backups - you'll need to look through them and work out what suits you best. Most hosts will do backups, but you should also do your own as problems with backups occur regularly. I'd also do a periodioc manual download of your site, just to be sure.

Some hosts will do a migration as well, some for $ and some for free.

To minimize downtime, I'd be looking at reducing the TTL on your domain so it switches over more rapidly. I'd also look at disabling comments on your old site just before the move, and when it's been moved for a day or so, switching your old site to a maintenance page, just to avoid confusion. Other than that, if it's just a straight blog, I don't see downtime being an issue.