I wanted to have my own domain for the longest time – around 5 years already. It’s in my bucket list. Whey it took me this long? I don’t know. Oh, wait…budget hahaha. Before, I found all service providers to be expensive. Even the yearly payments for your domain are expensive. And for someone with loans left and right years ago, I can’t justify those expenses. Besides, it was all just for personal use. My blog isn’t earning.

Five years after, there are more web hosting providers now so the prices are more competitive. Even the domains are almost always on sale at GoDaddy since January this year when I started monitoring. And last July, I saw a super discounted rate. I bought my domain at GoDaddy for a discounted price of Php 53.64 good for a year. Crossing my fingers that there will be promos too by the time I renew hehe.

For the web hosting part, I inquired from around 4 service providers based in PH before availing one from CoffeeMags.com. I found them through the blog of Maan. I had a good experience with them. I had a lot of questions even before purchasing that they patiently answered, which helped me finally decide to get their service. Case in point, I already have an idea about the whole migration process even before I placed my order! As per my experience, they usually reply in the afternoon and evenings, which is fine by me since it’s also during those times that I can spend some time for the blog.

The moment I sent my order to CoffeMags.com, I already received everything that’s related to my account setup–links, CPanel and WordPress admin login credentials, server information, instructions on what to update.

Here are the steps I made.

1. Bought my own domain — sayotekingdom.com!
2. Got a hosting package from CoffeeMags.com. I only availed of their initial package which is $1/month.Pointed my domain to their servers. Here’s the reference provided by CoffeeMags.
3. Website migration! I came from Blogger platform. When I got my domain, I got migrated to WordPress.org. I just backed up my Blogspot site, downloaded the Blogger to WordPress plugin (available in the WordPress admin page), and followed the instructions which is basically to load the xml file that I generated from Blogspot. The plugin includes migration of comments too!
4. Looked for a new theme which I can stick to for a long time because I don’t have plans of changing themes that often. It’s tedious hehe.

Next steps in the pipeline.

1. Reformat some old posts. These automatic creation of HTML tags when you are saving web files can result to a messy layout so you really need to do some tweaking. In my case, the paragraphs are messed up so I need to rebuild those posts – meaning retype them so that the theme’s css can be applied. I tried modifying the HTML parts but it gets back after switching from Visual to Text so…I guess my next best option is just to redo my posts by: a) copy to Notepad; b) Save blank post; c) Copy from Notepad back to new post window; d) Correct the formatting; e) Save. I have not done this first so let’s see if it works.
2. Switch categories to tags. The tags in Blogger were migrated as Categories in WordPress. I already saw a plugin for that.
3. Migrate images? My old posts are still referencing the images in my Blogger blog. My Blogger blog is still up (one, for sentimental reasons) so at least most, if not all images are appearing.
4. Tinker with CPanel and WordPress admin. It is one of the reasons why I wanted to have my own domain. I want to play around with these stuff.
5. And let’s see what else I will uncover in this adventure.

Special thanks to:

• Edel of LifeinManila.com for answering all my questions regarding hosting and domain names
• Maan of Joyfulmess.com for answering all my questions about her web host of choice. That really helped me decide on where to get my hosting services.

P.S. I want my lists to be formatted similar to how it is in Word — next lines are aligned to the text, not the bullets or numbers. I don’t know why TinyMCE, which I learned is the text editor in WordPress, is not doing that. Let’s see if I’ll be able to find a way to format it that way.