Part 2

This is the first part in a series I'll be doing, describing the process I went through while migrating my blogger blog to a hosted blog with the atomsite blog engine.

Why migrate my blog you ask?

Well, although Google offers blogger as one of their great free services, I wanted more control, and to have the blog engine in a programming language that I'm a bit more fluent with.

Purchasing a domain:

Besides just buying one, there were three things that bothered me:

 

Whois

Looking up domain names is very easy nowadays, and it can lead to a lot of spam and forgery attempts.

Most companies that offer domains has a Whois protection program, usually for an extra buck or two, well worth in my honest opinion.

 

DNS

I wanted to be able to control subdomains and cname records.

 

Name

This might seem as a silly thing, especially with the name I chose in the end, but this was one of the most time consuming steps of migrating my blog.

I tried to think of a catchy name, but in the end, I just went with my twitter account name convention.

 

Choosing a hosting provider:

The features I was looking for were:

 

Subdomains and cname handling

Comfortable control panel

IIS7 based, ready for asp.net mvc, with PHP modules installed

MSSQL Database available

Reasonable amount of disk space

 

I researched a bit, read both good and bad reviews of several hosting providers.

I must say that I didn't encounter any web hosting company that didn't have complaints.

In the end I chose webhost4life, both for hosting and purchasing (and managing) the domain name.

I can't say that they've been the best experience, I'll probably blog about that in the future, but they've worked good enough so far.

 

Part 2

Erik