Elbows Music Blog Community

I'm no expert on such matters but have a few thoughts. Tim is probably the best one to answer and can correct me if I'm wrong.

I think moving to wp.org would be a real good idea. You will have more flexibility to tweak and customize your layout. Plus, I think self-hosting is the right way to go these days. Not sure how you host your mp3's? Wp.com is free so hosting on your own domain would require extra money but would probably be worth it. Plus, the current main url you have is somewhat awkward with the .wordpress.com at the end.

You have everything redirected now which is good. But having apocketfullofseeds.com as your main domain would (imo) be more powerful for SEO and other things. The .com is still the best.

Overall, moving to wp.org would give you more options and flexibility than wp.com. Plus, wp.com is more susceptible to having the Google Blogocide issue. Being self hosted doesn't take that issue away but minimizes things somewhat especially if you also host your mp3's elsewhere. I had Site5 in the past which was quite expensive. And I also hosted my mp3's there. However, whenever a DMCA takedown notice was sent, it went to Site5. They then politely emailed me about the "infringing" content and gave me 24 hours to remove it which I did. No problems, from them. at least regarding shutting my site down. However, I cannot speak for other hosting services on that matter.

Regarding the wp.com to wp.org - I've never done it but am sure it's possible and probably fairly effortless. If memory serves, there should be a thread somewhere here that Tim wrote regarding doing that. Or maybe that was for blogspot to wp. Not sure.

Anyways that's my two quid worth, hopefully helpful rather than not.

As Merz and Ben have said - the move to wp.org gives you a lot of benefits and options for relatively little expense (~$5/mo).
The tech/setup of wordpress has also become very easy over the years, with plenty of hosts offering it as a one-click installs making it even easier.

The thread Merz is referring to is here and whilst that is more for the blogger to wordpress move, some of it is still relevant.

To move from there are three things you need to do:

1 - Install Wordpress
Find a host (there are plenty of options, but people on here quite like HostGator, Bluehost, HostNine)
Install Wordpress either through the one-click system within CPanel, or manually by setting up a MySQL database, uploading the wp.org files and filling in the relevant info.

2 - Export/Import the content.
In your wp.com dashboard go to Tools >> Export and download the wordpress export file.
In your wp.org dashboard go to Tools >> Import and install the plugin and import the wordpress export file you just downloaded, mapping the posts to the right author(s).

3 - Moving to a domain and keeping your SEO.
To maintain your SEO when moving from wordpress.com to your own domain, you first need to map your domain to your wp.com account (costs about $10 I think). This gets wordpress to redirect all your posts on wp.com to your domain.
Then you change the dns servers on your domain to point to your new host/website, and all search engine rankings are maintained and there are no broken links.

...and voila!

is hosting anything to so with the people I bought my domain names from?

Awesome comments form everyone.

Yeah you can buy hosting from your domain registrar in most cases.

That said, GoDaddy (the biggest registrar) has had major hosting issues over the last year, so they will not always be the best bet for hosting - even if billing would be slightly easier wrapped up in one.

If you find a host that runs CPanel it will probably make your life easier than the other control panels, and it is also the industry standard and very very widely used. Other than that, take your pick - there are thousands to choose from.

personally, have been very happy with godaddy. has been worth every penny, the customer service has been pretty sharp, never used cpanel anyways when i had it which probably makes it feel more worthwhile to me. but if you need cpanel to rock your stuff, disregard everything i just said.

Yeah, it was me. I'm having new issues, as the site load times have just been abysmal. They suggested I switch to their new 4G hosting, but there were quite a few hoops to jump through. Then they said I had to delete an MS Access DB on my hosting account, even though the folder was empty and I've never used anything that had an MS Access DB. I did it and it didn't work, so then the advanced team had to go in and delete it, it took them 4 days, they sent me a notice saying I was good to go and I still can't upgrade because of the same issue (the folder has reappeared). Now they're telling me that my server is too old to upgrade, so I'll either have to stick it out or delete the entire site and start fresh on the new servers. They tried blaming my theme over and over again, but I know it isn't the theme as it loaded just fine for months before any issues arose and I haven't changed anything. It's getting pretty fucking frustrating. If I have to delete the site I may just switch to someone else while I'm at it.

Wiredkey did end up warning me for CPU usage and I can't at the moment switch to dedicated hosting since I don't work so I had to move all my files to groovebat, was a pain, but atleast Wiredkey was nice and notified me about it. I guess before you pick a host think about the traffic you one day plan on bringing in. Popularity has a price :(

Think I mentioned this before about web hosting.  Seems everyone wants to go the real cheap route and I can understand why, especially if you don't have ads and are not making money.

lol I only pay like $5 a month ish and it's fine if you have mp3s hosted elsewhere.Lots of shit advertise unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth wasn't really my problem, it was more of memory and CPU usage when something gets popular.

Hello everyone,



As a new member, I wanted to say hello and introduce myself.  I'm Greg,
and I run a small blog called Given and Taken in Ink (formerly
gtimusic.blogspot.com, now gtimusic.net).  I DJ'd for a few years at my
grad school's radio station, but had to stop when I moved out of state. 
I started to miss it, but couldn't really find another community
station I liked (although I didn't try very hard), so I decided to start
a music blog instead.  It's been almost a year, and I just decided to
make the jump to a self-hosted site.  So far I'm really enjoying the
added flexibility of a self-hosted Wordpress site.



I spent some time researching how to switch domains without losing my
traffic, and I thought I did it right, but my pageviews have been
severely slashed in the week since I've been on gtimusic.net.  I don't
know if I did something wrong or just need to wait for Google to catch
up, but I used to have 30-100 views per day.  Yesterday I had 5.  I have
my old blog set to automatically redirect to the new one, and I put
individual redirects in for each post.  I also instructed search engines
not to follow my old blog (<meta content='NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW'
name='ROBOTS'/>), thinking it would force them to point to the new
one.  Maybe this is the reason?  My new site hasn't been indexed yet and
I intentionally stopped indexing the old one?  Should I remove this
line of code from the old blog?  The weird thing is my old site's stats
are reporting somewhat higher traffic, despite having a redirect for
every post.  Makes me wonder if Blogger uses different criteria to
determine what an actual pageview is.



Anyway, I appreciate the opportunity to participate here.  I had been
lurking for most of the last year but didn't want to join until I was
ready to self-host.  I'd be grateful for any other advice you guys may
have.


Thanks,
Greg

How did you redirect your old posts? Are you just redirecting the people visiting your homepage or are you redirecting each post as per this guide?

Forgot to mention, I also have a general redirect in my old blog for anyone who landed on the home page:

<meta content='6;url=http://gtimusic.net/' http-equiv='refresh'/>

Sounds good.  I changed the delay to 1 second and removed the noindex/nofollow.  Hopefully that helps.

My major referral sources were Google and all its individual country variants (.uk, .ca, etc), although I got a nice bump in traffic when Consequence of Sound linked to one of my posts a few months ago.  I haven't gotten any traffic for that post in quite a while, though, so I doubt that's affecting anything.

Now that I'm self-hosted, I feel like I have a lot more flexibility.  (And I can actually post mp3s now, instead of just streams.)  On the old blog I was barely averaging 2 posts per week, so I'm going to put most of my focus into posting more regularly and not worry so much about recovering the old traffic.

Anyway, I really appreciate the assistance.  Now I'm just wondering why it took me almost a year to apply for membership here...

Turns out, my traffic woes were worse than I thought they'd be.  Here's my sitemeter from the day I started GTI. 


The big drop for April 2011 was when I moved to the new domain.  I'll admit, I was not expecting it to be that bad.  Even with the mistake of the nofollow/noindex on my old blog, I only had that in place for a week.

Unfortunately, I'm not really sure what to do to recover that.  All my old posts redirect to their counterparts on the new domain.  I've been posting more frequently (April was tied with Dec 2010 for my highest post count in a month), so it's not due to lack of attention.  I am hoping this is temporary, but I'm still completely at a loss for why it happened and what to do.

@apocketfullofseeds Since switching, I actually have been using three: Wordpress Stats, sitemeter, and Google Analytics.  And you're right, Analytics is reporting a higher number for April.  Still not as high as the old domain was in Dec-March, but better than the graph I posted above.  So I guess that's positive.  Hopefully May will be better.

Update (not that I expect anyone to really care about this): I've been checking my sitemeter numbers and noticed last week that a few days had zero hits.  After my initial reaction ("Oh, come on!"), I thought that really just couldn't be right.

So...after a month of consternation and complaining, here's where I notice the egg on my face.  It would appear that after switching domains, I changed the URL in my sitemeter account, but never actually removed the sitemeter code from my old blog and put it on my new one.  As soon as I did that, my sitemeter numbers began to climb.

So all along I've been tracking the hits on the old blog, at least with sitemeter.  This makes me wonder what I potentially screwed up with Google Analytics, or whether I installed the tracking code at all.  (On the latter point, I assume I must have, since GA has been recording some hits, but I really can't remember now.)

I am a little embarrassed at myself right now.