I’ve just switched MyOwnPirateRadio from hosting on iPower.com to WordPress.com.
If you subscribe to the email version of this blog you probably noticed a few duplicate posts mailed out last night. My apologies, and fear not, for I haven’t yet stooped to duplicating my own blog posts. It was a glitch in the import process.
Why leave iPower?
- Poor availability. 5 hours of downtime in September, a whopping 49 hours in July. Not that this blog is mission-critical, but still, doesn’t 2 days seem a little excessive? Maybe they forgot to plug the server in.
- iPower recently started charging for domain privacy, with no warning. Deceptive.
- Their hosting prices have stayed the same while everyone else’s have dropped. $100+ a year is too much for a simple blog.
- Their web host management UI is geared at selling services, not helping customers get stuff done.
- Switching a domain to iPower is easy, switching away to another registrar is a devilish process. Again, bad business practice.
- Support: not so much.
So, after many years as a customer, I’m moving all my business away from iPower. This blog is going to WordPress.com, my domain registrations are going to namecheap, and 5 Blocks Out is now ticking along happily over on slicehost.
Why rehost on WordPress.com? There are other places I could have hosted, but for running a simple blog with minimal customization requirements it’s a great value. I can just "set and forget"… I don’t worry about security updates, spam, bandwidth, etc. The only downsides I’ve experienced are (1) advertising is present unless I pay to remove it, and (2) there seems to be no way to import images. If anyone knows an easy way to fix #2 (read: takes less than 20 minutes!) I’d love to know.
3 responses so far ↓
Steve // October 28, 2008 at 1:21 pm
With version 2.5, I believer the importer (http://codex.wordpress.org/Manage_Import_SubPanel) will import images if you check the “download attachments” option
oshoma // October 28, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Thanks Steve. I came across a few posts hinting that the wordpress application does support this. However the image upload feature is not supported on WordPress.com (the hosted WordPress service, not the open source wordpress.org). I confirmed with support: they say, “you will need to transfer any images manually.” So… +1 for this as a wordpress.com feature request.
Steve // October 28, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Ah, OK. I should have checked myself. WordPress.com actually uses “WordPress MU” which is the version that I’m currently using on a project. It once was a completely separate project that originated from the wordpress.com codebase, but since then it’s been somewhat rejoined with the single-user WordPress code. I guess that’s one of the features that isn’t in common code yet.