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:
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Subdomains and cname handling
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Comfortable control panel
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IIS7 based, ready for asp.net mvc, with PHP modules installed
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MSSQL Database available
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Reasonable amount of diskspace
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.
Erik