Offsite redirect makes it work so smoothly

WordPress self-hosted

WordPress is one of the great platforms for creating and hosting your blog. When you decide to move your site to self-hosted, WordPress Offsite Redirect lets you take your audience with you.

It’s a great way to preserve your reader base. Somehow we survived going cold-turkey to a new site but now you don’t need to take that plunge.

For $12 per year for each domain, WordPress allows you to direct all those great HTML links to your new self-hosted site.

This is a big plus. Most of us start on the free hosted service and at some point want to strike out on our own. At the point I decided to consolidate my 5 WordPress blogs into NJN Network on a self-hosted server, all I could do was put a notice on the front page of each blog and hope you came with me.   

Today each and every HTML link on the web should land you effortlessly on https://njnnetwork.com.

Redirecting a hosted blog is quite simple. On the Dashboard, select Upgrades…Offsite redirect. Enter the self-hosted web address and pay the $12 annual fee.

I tested 5 stories from each of the five blogs. The old HTML address was redirected to the correct story on NJN Network.

If you get sent to a “story not found page”, please let us know.

Life with a self-hosted blog

Self hosting a blog is generally what people do when the blog gets big enough and has enough traffic to generate ad revenue. WordPress doesn’t allow ads on their hosted sites.

If you are getting less than 100,000 verified visitors a month, forget about ad revenue from Google Adsense. It will be less than $100 per month.

However, if you want to sell your products and services through the blog, which is said to be the money making formula for small blogs, self-hosting is the only way to go.

Self hosting also allows you to register your own domain name and control your destiny to some extent.

The downside of self-hosting is cost. You have to rent space on someone’s server. Shared hosting is cheap but the security is poor and the speed can be slow. You’re sharing the same network resources with potentially thousands of other people.

The next rung up the ladder in self-hosting is VPS or Virtual Private Servers. The hosting company dedicates space and resources on a virtual server to your sites. The performance upgrade can be phenomenal but the cost is higher. Sharing the space with another friendly domain can shave the cost but increase security. This is not for the faint of heart. You’ll need SQL database and Apache skills to keep your site running. And you’re responsible for everything, even backup.