I’ve moved the blog to another host again. This time I’m using one of WordPress’ starter hosts, but besides a change in the blog theme (that I did so begrudgingly because I couldn’t migrate the beloved readit theme I’ve been using the past couple of years), from a reader’s perspective you wouldn’t notice anything different.
I’ve moved hosts a lot since I first started blogging. At least now I have the know-how to transfer the blog content along with each change but it wasn’t always that way. Changing blog hosts often meant starting completely from scratch every time. Hopefully this will be one of the last times I change hosts and I’ll tell you why I think that.
The hosting platform I’ve used for the past year or so has been Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP). I signed up for the free tier, which gives you access to their hosting platform free of charge for a year, or until your account accrues around $400 worth of charges – whichever comes first. With that, I instantiated a WordPress instance and everything else was easy flying. Make no mistake, the inner workings of GCP come with a difficult learning curve for beginners. But once you get WordPress working you can manage everything straight from the admin panel on the website itself. Essentially you need to learn just enough to get the website up and running, after that you never need to open the cloud console ever again.
When my free trial neared the end, I wanted to see how much of the trial credit the website burned through over the year to get an idea of how much I’d be paying after the trial ended. I didn’t get a whole lot of traffic during that year but I was shocked to see that almost all of the $400 had been used up. I knew that I would have had to switch as soon as I could, because paying $400 a year was obscene. To verify, I kept the blog running for another couple of weeks and already I was charged around $22 for that duration.
Since the back-end used WordPress’ toolkit I was keen to just move my blog over to WordPress’ hosting service. But more than that I wanted a hosting platform that I could run the blog on and not have to worry about usage charges. I really liked the freedom of GCP, but having to constantly monitor my billing account on it was too much. In the end, blogging is just a hobby for me. An important hobby, to be sure, but just a hobby nonetheless. I’m glad that I can focus purely on hopping on here to write instead of maintaining the upkeep of it all. And if that means paying WordPress $50 a year to do that for me, I’m more than happy to.
Scripted Journal 