In the past Soonr hosted its WordPress blogs on its own hosting service. As such we had complete control over everything, but we also had to maintain our blog. That meant that all code updates, plugins, RSS, trackbacks, etc, etc, – all had to be maintained by someone in the company. Well, it became too hard. Not only was it time-consuming, we’d have to mess with the occasional spam posted as comments from those .ru domains. Yeah, you know who you are.
WordPress will host the new Soonr blog
So one of our engineers proposed that we move to WordPress.com or TypePad. These are arguably the two biggest platforms out there. So after a few days of poking about we decided to goto WordPress, as much for familiarity as features. Besides, all the blog authors already knew how to use WordPress.
The Migration:
So it sounds easy right? But what if you want to maintain all your previous posts? How about all the images? Oh yeah, there’s the domain names and the IP address. Then there’s the links to point to the blog. All these had to be considered for the move because you don’t want them to break.
Now, kudos to WordPress for making the text, comments, and tags, easy to migrate. It was literally a 5 minute export then import process. But now all the manual parts begin. I am deep in the midst of moving over the images. We were able to import most of the images from the previous site, but many were scattered in different directories and these have to be tracked down and moved one by one.
The Advantages?
Why go through all this pain? Well as the primary author of the blog, I can say that the authoring tools are much slicker, the add-ins are much easier to install, and the crosslinking to social networks, rss, etc. are practically done for you! It’s definitely going to be a lot easier to use going forward.
The bottom line is that this is a perfect example of why you would want to outsource something instead of doing it all in house. Sure the migration is a bit painful, but afterwards I’ll have all the advantages of having the blog maintained by a provider and all I have to do is enjoy the benefits.
So, this brings me to Soonr. Why mess with in-house backup, mobile access, and collaboration tools? Just like our blog, you should take the time to migrate. It may seem daunting now, but the payoff will be well worth it!
Now, I just have to update a half dozen or so old posts a day until the end of the month….
Congrats with your new home for the Soonr blog!
I totally agree. I have run numerous installs of WordPress blogs on my own servers for years, and I have totally had it with all the updating and meddling. Hosted service is much better, and easier. With easy domain mapping, WordPress’ hosted service doesn’t even hurt your SEO.
Best regards,
Mikael
Thanks Mikael for your comments. It took us a while to get to this, but we got really tired of battling spam! We at Soonr offer a web based service and really believe it them. So I guess it’s good that we use them as well. We’ve got all the mapping done now… At the end of this month, the old blog location goes down. It’s already being redirected now.
Phat post, good looking website, added it to my favs!!