Why Self-Hosting a Blog Became Important to Me

Welcome to my new blogging home! I kept everything I could about the old blog, including my 7 years of posts and my theme, and migrated it over to my website.

I’m sure lots of you are wondering why after 7 years with WordPress.com, I decided to self-host my blog on my own website.

It wasn’t a decision I undertook lightly because it was costly and time consuming.

I’d thought about it in the past as a way to increase traffic to my own website, but the cost had dissuaded me. Besides, everything was going great with WordPress.com. I didn’t have a need to switch.

But in November 2016 during the tail end of my blog tour for Highway Thirteen to Manhattan something awful happened: my blog was suspended by WordPress.com for violating the terms of service.

There was no warning. I just typed in the URL and got a this site is suspended for violating the terms of service page.

I emailed WordPress and they told me someone had notified them that my blog was spam and  therefore in violation of the terms of service because I was doing book promotion on my personal blog that they hosted.

Now, mind you, my blog is about MY AUTHOR JOURNEY. And I absolutely was posting about my book tour. But only about my book tour. I emailed with WordPress explaining this and they quickly reinstated my blog a few days later and apologized for the mistake.

This experience, however, shocked me. That my blog platform could be taken down so quickly without any notice during a blog tour told me that I could no longer remain with WordPress.com as my blog host. It was simply too risky.

I immediately contacted my amazing web designer and she began the steps to build my blog into my own website so that I could self-host it.

We began the process in December. It’s been months of migrating and checking and testing. I’m hopeful things will transition smoothly, but I’m sure there will be hiccups.

We were able to migrate all my blog subscribers, so you should still get updates about postings in your inbox. If anyone isn’t receiving them, please let me know and we will look into it.

Have any of my blog friends made the switch to self-hosting? How has your experience been?

 

 

 

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