Leaving Wordpress

When I started looking at moving my hosting for my Wordpress site from Slicehost to Amazon EC2 purely for the sake of saving some cash I did a really poor job of it. I left it in an inconsistent state which ultimately meant I had no confidence in where my posts would be; in the old system or the new? Coupled with a general laziness for updating WP to the latest version for the sake of security I just really didn't have the time to invest in making it work nicely. What did I do? I signed up for a free trial at Squarespace.

I remembered seeing Squarespace a while back and felt impressed by it even if I couldn't remember the name (I knew it was Square-something though) and gave it a go with the free trial. I'd only just cleaned my site and started from scratch so it is easy, and visually I wanted something new anyway. First impressions are very positive for this managed hosted application.

1. It's cheaper than self-hosting
2. I have no faith in Wordpress hosted; it was breached recently. Not as bad as Sony but still it's a worry
3. I won't have to bother with updating
4. It has more on offer than stock Wordpress, and I was too lazy to install add-ons
5. It has some neat stats
6. It allows custom CSS, and more importantly Javascript. Google Analytics will still work, unlike Wordpress.
7. It has an iPad app; I've yet to try it but it can't possibly be worse than the Wordpress app

This was posted from the website, I plan to try the iPad next. The only problem I've had so far is the WP importer only seems to read in the excerpt - if you have a lot of entries I suggest you export them and manipulate them first otherwise you'll lose a lot of text. I only have a few so it was easier to cut-n-paste the handful that were wrong. It also lost my align-right on images. It did copy the images over though, and upload them into Amazon S3.

Fingers crossed this will be the last time I move my blog, and instead I can just write stuff. Here's to Squarespace; may they do well again the Wordpresses and Tumblrs of this world and add some flair and innovation too.

Update on Wednesday 1 June 2011 at 22:00 by Antony

Well I hit the DNS changes to switch the site to the new one. Now I just have to wait for the DNS to propagate. So far I'm liking how easy it is to work with.