I’ve been blogging for almost 11 years now and I have shared briefly about my early blogging days but I have yet to share with you how you can start to blog professionally.
In the next upcoming weeks, I will be posting articles and videos on how you can start a blog professionally to earn some side income. If you would like to learn more, do subscribe to my blog or follow me on my Social Media pages for more details.
Recently, I’ve transferred my domain from my old hosting provider to another reputable hosting provider called Exabytes. The domain transfer has prompted me to share some of the problems I encounter with blogger and how I overcome them.
Why do I have to spend money to buy a domain name?
Maintaining a blog isn’t easy and it does cost you some money. If you do not want to spend money on setting up a blog, you can create a blog under free blogging sites or website builders like Blogger.com or Wix.com.
And if you are truly serious about blogging, I highly recommend that you get your own website domain. It helps with branding and building a strong online presence. It will also help to increase search engine optimization (or SEO) of your site. In addition, it will be easier for others to remember your site address too.
Where to buy your own website domains?
I can purchase a website domain across various hosting service providers. I personally have tried a few web hosting sites and their prices and services are generally quite competitive. Currently, my website is hosted by Exabytes Singapore and my experiences with them have been somewhat interesting.
Why I transfer my existing domain to Exabytes?
My site was previously hosted by a reputable web hosting service provider but it was under my friend’s account. Thus, if I have any technical issues with my site, I would have to go through him and a series of security checks before their IT team could step in to rectify the issue.
Why Exabytes?
After a couple of years, I decided I should open my own account under a new web hosting site provider. I hope that in doing so, I would be able to manage my own site more effectively. And I happen to come across Exabytes, a leading cloud service provider in Southeast Asia, on Facebook. They were promoting an IT webinar which was highly useful for businesses who are planning on going digital as well as for bloggers like myself. I was intrigued and decided to join the webinar. I ended up benefitted from it so much and decided to read up more about the company itself.
After doing a quick search, I was surprised to find that they do offer a variety of IT solutions for both businesses and individuals. Besides web hosting services, they also provide cloud hosting, shared hosting, VPN/server solutions, website designing and even digital marketing. Given its positive reviews and established credibility, I thought why not migrate my site over to Exabytes?
Competitive Pricing
The cost of the ‘.COM‘ domain pretty much hovers around $20 per year plus across most web hosting provides. If you decide to go for their 2-year package, you can enjoy some savings.
Is it easy to transfer and review your existing domain?
It was somewhat challenging on my end due to the circumstances I was in. This was because my site was under my friend’s account so it was difficult for me to liaise with my ex-web host provider for the site migration.
Exabytes has been patient in providing instructions on how I should go about it but being an IT-dummy myself, I could not quite grasp their instructions. I wish there were step-by-step videos or tutorials to help me along. Because besides doing the domain transfer, you will also have to transfer all the existing data on your site to the new web host provider. So that means you will have to do a proper site backup.
To cut the long story short, I decided that I should get Exabytes to perform the site migration for me. But it comes with an additional fee. In my personal opinion, if you do not know what you are doing, it is best to hire a professional to do it.
Any hiccups?
I am not going to lie but yes, there are some problems during the site migration. The migration usually take a few hours and during this period, my site was down. However, my site was down for a few days before it starts to bounce back up. I was a little paranoid when JetPack detected that my site was down as I was worried that my SEO and site rankings will be affected.
I guess, on one hand, my site data is pretty extensive, considering that I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years now. Over the decade, I’ve written over 1,600 blog posts! As such, I believe that the site migration process thus took somewhat longer than usual. But Exabytes reassured me that the site will back up in no time and true indeed, after a few days, things went back to normal. And in fact, my site is performing slightly much better now than before.
Optimized WordPress Hosting
In addition to the domain transfer, I also tried their optimised WordPress Hosting services. Since I was using WordPress for my blog, I thought why not? It is an addition $6 per month for the WP Blogger services. I guess this also helps to increase my site speed as well.
My Verdict on Exabytes
Overall, I am pretty pleased with Exabytes services thus far. They are usually available 24/7 when you need technical support or assistance. If I encounter any site issues, I will send a Whatsapp message to their support team and they will usually get back to me within minutes. I find that they respond faster via Whatsapp as compared to other modes of contact like phone calls or emails. But as long as they are quick in resolving any website issues, I am good. Because time is money. The moment your website is down, you need to find ways to quickly get it back up.
In my next article, I will share how I do up my WordPress site with the free available themes and how to customise it according to your own preferences. It can get a little technical here but I will try my best to explain them using layman terms.
