I want to change my wordpress.com to a selfhosted site through wordpress.org
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I have set up my blog too quickly in wordpress.com then finding out that it cannot support the plugins I need to use. I desperately want to keep my url.
I need to know how to change it to a selfhosted blog using wordpress.org software and still keep my url. As I am not the most savvy technology person I will need specific directions if there is a way.
Thank you
JanetThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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If you want to tell us what you want to accomplish, we can probably tell you how to do it without plugins. If you are not tech savvy, WP.org is probably going to be a bad idea.
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One note, this URL, http://steps2life.wordpress.com/ , you cannot keep if you self-host. You will have to pay to register a domain name through a registrar.
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That’s not uncommon. Some people do a lot of learning and deciding first, before actually blogging, and often they’d find things out faster if they just blogged. I suspect we’ve got someone who’s been listening to advice on WordPress without the context.
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A lot of people don’t make sense to me, just say “it won’t work” and not say “I need a membership management Plug-in” or what ever function they have been told a Plug-in is needed for (never mind they never looked at the Widgets here that replace many many Plug-in’s).
Maybe Plug-in envy?
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To Auxclass – it has no content – because I rushed into setting it up before realising it wasn’t going to do what I needed it to do – my own silly fault!
What I want to do is promote a particular product (a clickbank product that I am also using personally) which uses plugins that will only work if you have a self hosted site, the author recommends wordpress as the best to use – but as stated I jumped in too quick – I could easily start a new one going through his instructions properly – but I really like the name I’ve created – it encompasses what I’m about. I don’t understand widgets – but I will certainly look at them and try and understand what they do.
Raincoaster – ur probably quite right – I’m a trusting soul!
The author says in his training video that his plugins are not compatible with wordpress.com blogs or with anything OTHER than wordpress, saying that we need to have a self hosted wordpress site.If all else fails I will go back to square one for that particular product and keep steps2life for my other plans.
Well, at least I’m learning and giving it a go! -
You can’t use clickbank on WordPress.COM (research the Terms of Service) and TSP has pointed out the steps2life.wordpress.com can’t be transferred.
So your only real option is to register your own Domain name and find a host. WordPress.ORG has several how to set up you own blog guides. Figure $10- to $25- a month and you are now the site Admin and Tech Support.
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To go self-hosted.
1. Register a domain name ($6 to $15 per year)
2. Hire a webhost (godaddy, bluehost, dreamhost, etc.)
3. Edit the domain name DNS records and point it at your webhost (they will give you that information). Wait 24 hours for DNS record propagation to take place.
4. Intall and configure the wordpress software, including making a MySQL database. Most webhosts have a one-click installer script, but they are not always running the latest version of wordpress in which case you will have to immediately do an upgrade to wordpress. This can get involved if your host does not by default give enough memory to wordpress and sometimes it requires that you create a php.ini file to override the default memory settings so that you can run the upgrade from with wordpress.
5. Set up all the different things on wordpress (time offset, permalink structure, etc.)
6. Find and install a theme of your liking (be careful here of the source for that theme as there are some gutter dwellers out there that are including malware in theme files). Sad but true.
7. Find and install the plugins you want to use, but heed the warning in #6 above as malware shows up in plugins as well. Again, sad but true.
8. Export your content from wordpress.com and import it into your wordpress installation. There are internal file size limits, so if you have a lot of content, you might have to go into the export file and break it up into smaller chunks so that it will import. You need to read up on this as there are specific parts of the file that have to be in each of the chunks.
9. That is about it except for the following.You will be responsible for all upgrades, all installations, all backups and all troubleshooting. If you install a theme or a plugin that kills your blog, then you have to figure out what went wrong and fix it. Sometimes it is a conflict with another plugin, sometimes is it is just a poorly written plugin (there are many out there). If you install a plugin with a security flaw, and your blog is hacked, you had better have a good, recent backup or you might just lose everything. I cannot stress the importance of frequent backups. I’ve been called into many situations where there were no recent backups (or none at all) and no backups available from the host, and there was nothing left to recover, so in one case, 3 years of postings virtually every day were gone. Only about 15% of them could be recovered by copy and paste from google cached pages, the rest were simply gone.
I’m not trying to scare anyone off, just letting them know what is ahead. In the last 3 months, I’ve helped to recover a total of 35 blogs that were “hacked.” Luckily in most cases we were able to recover most of it, but the average cost of recovering one is about $500. Think about that when you ponder if backing up your blog is really that necessary.
WordPress has done an outstanding job of jumping on security issues and making wordpress as secure as they can right out of the box, but the thing you have no control over is the web hosting company and their server configurations, and some of them are not all that secure.
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One last thing. Figure an average monthly total cost of about $10 to $25. Most bloggers I know that take this route to make money via advertising do not make up for their hosting and domain registration costs, and with literally millions of people downloading and installing things like adblock plus on their browsers each month, fewer and fewer people are seeing ads. I installed it years ago and have literally seen non ads in that time. If one comes up that it does not block, I simply right click and zap it and never see it again.
Adblock Plus for Firefox has been downloaded from the mozilla.org site 98,112,095 times as of the end of October 2010.
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Oh and one last thing. Seriously this will be the last.
Do not go with the free web hosting out there, or the $5.95 per year hosting plans that some places are advertising to hook people. You get what you pay for.
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Thank you to you all – I shall check my product terms and information again before getting in too deep. I certainly don’t want to break the wordpress rules already. Thank you for that. A big thank you ‘the sacredpath’ great info and I will be mindful of what you have suggested and mak my decision accordingly. Interesting about the adblock info.
I went out for a drive for a while – needed to clear my head and came back with a plan. I will keep this blog and use it differently to what I originally had intended – I’ve got plenty that I want to do, so that’s ok. I have come up with a similar name (but not quite the same) for the product I want to promote.
I’ve checked your sites out and am amazed at what can be done on a blog. I am really looking forward to learning more and getting my own looking just as good – and I will – because I am more than a conqueror!
Thanks again for all your feedback – now i’ve got a bit of work ahead of me.
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