Upgade to a personalized domain

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  earthgirlcooks · Member · May 25, 2011 at 12:07 pm

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  Hi-

  I know that I pay $17 a year if I want a personalized domain name without wordpress.com attached to it. What happens if after a year or so I don’t want to pay for the domain anymore? Can I transfer my blog to a “free” wordpress acccount without losing content?

  Thanks,
  Rae Ann

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  auxclass · Member · May 25, 2011 at 1:49 pm

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  If you don’t pay the $17- then the personal domain name just goes away and the content stays on the blog you mapped to – sort of automatic, no need to transfer anything as the content is already on the mapped blog – all that goes away is the custom domain and your regular visitors will be a bit lost and have trouble finding your blog.

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  timethief · Member · May 25, 2011 at 6:13 pm

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  What happens when you fail to nrenew an domain name is that it be auctioned. It can cost a small fortune to get it back from the domainers who buy these up when they expire.

  What happens when you fail to renews domain mapping is every one of the URLs to the domain name break and return “404’s” page not found when people use Google and click them or when they use Twitter and click them or when they type the domain URLs into their top browser bar and click in or when they click in from a blogroll link, etc.

  The default URLs ie. tthe original wordpress.com URLs are what becomes available after re-indexing but there is no mapping and that means a broken URL mess that will result in visitor frustration and a traffic loss to your blog.

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  auxclass · Member · May 25, 2011 at 6:23 pm

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  ~~TT

  Basically your site would start all over just like it was a completely new blog (well a bit worse off as Google and others would start to see double content)

  I just looked at your site and I would expect that you have some regular visitors given your content, and they would be really lost –

  My advice – pay the $ 17– each year and if necessary give up maybe the three Lattes a year it costs to pay for the mapping.

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  timethief · Member · May 25, 2011 at 6:28 pm

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  ~~auxclass

  I agree with you on this “pay the $ 17– each year”.