One door closes, another door opens

I've had a Wordpress blog for well over 10 years, hosted by GoDaddy, and managed by me. It's been great, and I've enjoyed the opportunity to become familiar with Wordpress. It's a great platform.

But it's also not cheap. Although Wordpress is open source software, you still need to host it somewhere, so that usually means taking up a hosting plan with a commercial hosting provider. I've paid GoDaddy to keep this blog up for well over a decade now, and have gladly just worn the cost.

However, it's always been tempting to move everything across to Blogger, this free blogging platform from Google. I know that there's a degree of risk in doing that, given how many of Google's products end up in the Google Graveyard, but I feel that Blogger still has a lot of life in it, and don't really think it's going away anytime soon. Wordpress is definitely a more permanent and safer option, although the trade-off is that it's expensive. 

However, I had to call GoDaddy with a technical question today and when they went through their usual upsell process, they reminded me just how much I pay every year ($217, not counting the domain name). I mean, it's not excessively expensive, but when she tried to upsell me to a 5 year plan "to save money" and told me that instead of $1085, it would only be about $800, I finally decided it was time to make the change.

I own quite a few domain names, so for now I have moved the old Wordpress site over to betcher.org, and then used my chrisbetcher.com domain for this new Blogger blog, where I will continue blogging. I'd migrated a copy of the old Wordpress blog to Blogger a while ago, and had been running the two in parallel, so that part of the move was fairly easy. The hard part was untangling the spaghetti-like mess of DNS settings; Nameservers, A Records, CNAME Records, redirects and so on, that had accumulated over the years and then waiting for the DNS to propagate, which can sometimes take a few hours.

So for now www.betcher.org loads my old Wordpress blog, which will remain as an active archive until October when it's due for renewal. And www.chrisbetcher.com now loads this new Blogger blog which will cost me nothing, and I've even managed to tweak the design into something I quite like.

So, I guess that's the end of an era for me and Wordpress as I revisit blogging here on Blogger (where it all began). 

I hope you'll still continue the conversation with me.