Moving to WordPress and WebFaction
For some time, I’ve had hosting with WebFaction for some personal python+django projects I was (well, am still…) working on while my main blog was hosted with ServerIntellect (a great hosting company, by the way).
While WebFaction breaks one of my steadfast rules of hosting by not having a plainly visible phone number (actually, I can’t find one anywhere on their site), I’ve been incredibly pleased with the hosting overall.
I’ve been running my own Trac installs, SVN servers, Mercurial servers, and now WordPress for < $10/mo.
And now I’m hosting two top level domains as well. Still < $10/mo.
While I do miss being able to call someone 24-7, their documentation on how to install and configure the various apps is great, their reps are active in the support forums, the plethora of out-of-the-box applications is great (django, Trac, SVN — just to name a few), and I’ve gotten email responses to newb-ish Linux questions in about 2-3 minutes. But overall, it’s just a more useful platform for me.
The whole blog move seemed daunting when I approached it, but I really just needed to slice out a small chunk of time and get it done. All-in-all, I had my content migrated and visible in I’d say less than 20 minutes.
I found these resources helpful in getting it all done:
- Aaron Lerch – Breaking Up: Moving Blog Engines
- DasBlog to BlogML Converter (extract and convert my current blog contents; posts, categories, comments — everything)
- Sean Patterson’s BlogML Importer Plugin
- John Godley’s Redirection Plugin (redirect my .aspx URLs; I couldn’t get it to work using .htaccess alone)
At the end of the day, it wasn’t nearly as dreadful as I feared it would be. However, it was ultimately worth it to stop paying for two hosting providers and the pains of the aging dasBlog engine.
