Hi bunnies. Buckle in-this a long story.
I transitioned to self hosting in April 2020 and it is now October and I AM DONE. I am getting rid of it and moving back to wordpress hosted.. I just am not tech savvy enough for this shit.
And all those articles you’ll read about how easy it is to transition is bullshit. Sure, you can fumble your way through the transition but once the site is up and running, the amount of updates and bumps in the road are too difficult to navigate!!! Here’s what happened to me:
April – transition was a slightly difficult. I did a lot of research and finally settled on Siteground to host my site. Siteground did have a fast response time on their chat online. So I followed the tutorials on transitioning my site and it did take a day to get everything done. They sent messages with directions and my site was up and I kept my URL, my draft posts, my scheduled posts and my already public posts. I kept all my pictures but lost my theme and the basic look of my site.
Over the next few weeks I found a theme I really liked, I got ads on my site (the main reason I transitioned) and got LOTS of plugins. I was happy to have plugins because with the wordpress-com site I wasn’t allowed to have plugins. I didn’t realize how many plugins I needed though.. I needed one for jetpack (tracking site visits and such), I needed one for being able to see my scheduled post calendar, I needed one for security, one for spam comments, one to see featured images in my edit page and the list goes on and on…
On top of that I had to log in and check my site every day or so because the plugins and themes need to be updated regularly..
So the problems were as follows:
- My site went down randomly without explanation and I had to talk to IT support each time to figure out how to get my site back up and running.. Sometimes the outages were for a few minutes and sometimes for a few hours. I had friends telling me they went to my site and it gave them error messages..
- My viewership has rock bottomed since moving. A lot of the articles and reviews from bloggers say you will keep your viewers and followers when you transition. I was particularly concerned because most of my views come from other wordpress blogs and the WordPress Reader. I talked to a blogger who said she kept her viewers. Once I transitioned and waited a couple months – NOTHING. My daily and weekly views dropped by over 90%. I was fed lies.
- I didn’t realize I still needed to pay wordpress to keep my site up. Something about the hosting site and the domain?? So this meant I needed to pay both wordpress and siteground.. The siteground account was already bleeding me dry financially.. I only realized this because my site was down for over a day and I had no idea why. IT finally explained it to me and I was so pissed! I did so much reading and there was too much I still missed or didn’t understand fully..
- I ran out of storage really fast on siteground. I have 3 years worth of blog posts so that accumulates to a lot of content. I get daily emails from Siteground telling me I need to upgrade my storage which means upgrading my account. I don’t have the viewership to justify upgrading my account to double what I’m paying now. I did various things like get the smush plugin to reduce the size of my pictures to free up space and that fix only extended my storage life by like 2 months.
- My most current problem was the last straw – my site randomly went down AGAIN and IT said they found suspicious files in my site!! So did I get hacked??(Apparently this happens if my plugins and shit aren’t updated but I updated every 2 days so wtf..) I have no clue what that means and this time they cant even fix it for me! They gave me this long run-around of ‘read this tutorial to remove the files’ but the tutorial was written for people who know how to code! I don’t know shit!! So I reached out again and asked for step by step help. They told me where to find the files so I found one and deleted it as directed. Then they said “don’t delete all of them”… well you just said to!! Then they clarified that I should review them before deleting.. Well how do i know if a file looks “suspicious”?? I DON’T CODE. Everything just looks like numbers and letters!!! I’m beyond frustrated. Then they tell me they recommend me getting a web expert to do it for me. They give me a link to one of their partners who is a security company. I go to this site and it’s $200 for a yearly subscription… great…. More money… By this point it’s 11pm at night and I’m ready to give up. I don’t want to spend more money but they’re telling me if I delete the wrong file i’ll permanently ruin my website. So what choice do I have???
I signed up for the ridiculous security site and now I’m waiting.. They don’t even have a 24/7 chat line or anything… so I’m writing up this post as I’m waiting.. But once this shit is fixed I’m getting rid of this Siteground and moving back to wordpress hosted..
This ish is not for me. I need a simpler way to blog. I have a full time job so I can’t maintain my blog this much.. I just don’t have the time or the patience to do all this.. I have received no advantages to this self hosted transition. I owned my site, sure but that was it. Viewership, ease of use, nothing was what I was told or expected.
Part two coming tomorrow – it gets worse..
xoxo,
hunnyy
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