Just a reminder to myself, of why I moved my blog. 

I suppose I started my self-hosted blog when I wrong my own PHP-MySQL blog, oh, about a decade ago. It wasn’t exactly revolutionary – but it did posts, and categories, and it was mine. In those early days of blogs, I was pleased.

Then I realised that there were now proper blogging platforms appearing – and WordPress was one of them. Eventually, when I realised how good it was, I migrated over – but still to my own self-hosted site, so I could write my own PHP stuff and host it too.

I don’t write PHP script for fun or curiosity like that any more.

So I was already wondering if I wanted to stick with a self-hosted blog. It was more administration than I wanted (though not too much, to be fair). It was more expensive. I didn’t need anything that usual. It had simply become inertia; I didn’t want the hassle of migrating existing, so I drifted along.

Well, it’s coming up to my annual renewal time of year, and I was again wondering, why do I run this this way? Then I got hacked. I’ll write more about that another time, but it made me ask if I should figure out what had been done and fix the site – or just migrate off it. It made me look at hosted WordPress, particularly the migration side of things. It looked straight-forward. I’d expected something worse.

I did find that links between blog posts in my blog were not re-mapped when imported into WordPress.com, but some clever use of regular expressions seems to sort that out. With some trepidation, I migrated…

…and it was all very simple. It did what it said on the tin. The only quirk was that the import says it has finished when it still appears to be pulling across pictures.

Sorting out the categories and tags afterwards was quite hard work, but even that was manageable. Eventually.

Things I really like so far? Well, the import was good. The cost is good; I paid a little to have a nicer domain name, but it’s still pretty inexpensive. Everything seems to work better again – JetPack wasn’t working correctly on my self-hosted blog, and my stats were misbehaving. I don’t have to worry about admin in the same way. And two-factor authentication is available (and was one of the first things I set up. Andy likes two-factor auth!)

So far, so good.