Why we decided to go Self Hosted

For those of you that dont know we set up our blog in October 2015 on wordpress.com, it wasn’t until August 2016 that we purchased our first domain which was www.threebrits.com, in August 2017 our domain was up for renewal and we decided to take the plunge and change our domain to www.two-brits.com as there was now only two of us. Luckily we had only had our domain for a year and although it was annoying because our domain authority was back to 0 we worked our little butts off and got it back up in no time at all.

All throughout 2017 we were talking about going self hosted, we knew we wanted to do it but we just never got round to it. We were confused by the entire process and we didn’t have a chance to research more about it. One of our goals for 2018 in fact it was probably our top goal for 2018 was to go self hosted.

In February we finally purchased a self hosting plan, we did a bit of research on a couple of self hosting plans and decided to go with HostGator. They had a good package and it appeared that their customer service was rated highly as well.

We decided to go for the 36 month plan because it was cheaper to do it this way and it also means we don’t have to worry about paying for another hosting plan for 3 years.

We were about to go ahead and purchase the plan when a pop up appeared offering us ‘3 years for the price of 2 53% off’ so of course we clicked on it and it dropped the price to $200. So a top tip would be to go off of the page for a couple of minutes and when you return you may have a discount code waiting for you!

We payed $200 for the 36 month plan, just a small thing to note is that they will charge you EU Value Added Tax which was about $42 so if you are in the USA it would be even cheaper than $200.

So our plan had been purchased and we were already smashing through our 2018 goals we did a little celebratory dance before thinking OH GOD WHAT DO WE DO NOW!!?? We are not technical in the slightest we have no idea how to export from WordPress.com and import it to our WordPress.org dashboard? LIKE WHAT? in fact we didn’t even know this was part of the process at this point.

So STRESSED does not cover it, we didn’t know what to do! HostGator offer a free migration of content and domain but after a few chats with them on their 24/7 chat we decided to go with WP Beginners (WordPress for Beginners).

We are so glad we went with WP for beginners as they also offer a free migration service. All they require is your WordPress Login & Password & the self hosting Login & Password so make sure you update these to a password you want them to know and and can easily change after the process is complete.

So during the process we were still highly confused and we thought instead of confusing ourselves even more at this stage we will just wait to the migration to take place and we can then go from there.

Make sure you turn your wordpress.com site to private so readers arent still access your site via wordpress.com.

Add in the plugin JetPack and it will move across all your followers to your new and improved site.

WordPress for beginners were literally incredible and we cannot praise them enough! They talked us through the fact we would not be using WP Admin to write out posts, which we didn’t even know about (LOL).

We have now been up and running on our self hosted blog for just over 3 months and it was honestly the best decision we ever made.

Our views have improved, our Domain Authority has gone up and we realised we could finally start making some money from our blog, how you ask? We added google ad sense!

We are so glad we took the leap and went self hosted. If you are completely confused by the entire process just like we were then please do ask us any questions you like! We finally feel like we understand it all now.

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