Category: Site News

Apologies for site-related updates! I have decided to close comments automatically on posts which are older than 30 days old. In general this is because the only comments I get on old blog posts are spam, and this is an attempt to try and curtail that. Akismet is pretty good at catching most spam comments, but one or two still slip through the net.

If you do happen to want to comment on an old blog post… I’m sorry. If I’m honest, I’m less convinced that comments are a good thing than I used to be. Anyway, feedback is still good, but it just has to be within 30 days unless there’s a particular reason!

If you want to contact me, there’s always the contact page…

Just wanted to say that all the website admin stuff I mentioned in my previous post is now complete. In case you’re curious about what I’ve done, here’s a quick post with an explanation. Maybe it will help someone who was in a similar situation to me (i.e., paying for hosting you don’t need).

Previously I’ve hosted my site on a hosting package provided by Prime Hosting. This was costing me about £60 per year (I don’t think the same package is available now, I originally set it up in about 2005 and haven’t updated it since). I was also paying about £12 every two years for the phillsacre.me.uk domain name.

I’ve been questioning whether this is entirely necessary of late – I think I even blogged about this but can’t find it where… the problem is, what is the point of paying around £60 per year for hosting what is basically a blog when you can get a free blog on WordPress.com? I couldn’t really answer that question satisfactorily – in the past I’d used my site to host things such as DJ mixes, but these days there are loads of free services which can do stuff like that and there are also what seem like hundreds of free blogging services. In other words, I was paying out for stuff I didn’t really need.

So, the key question is, what have I done, and how much am I now paying? Well, I’ve done a few things:

• Transferred the domain name over to 123-reg.co.uk, who are usually fairly good at domain name pricing. But the main thing is, with 123-reg you get flexibility – I now own the domain separately to the hosting, so I can choose to do as I like with it.
• I’ve set up a new blog with WordPress (free account) – I was using WordPress before, so it was dead easy to export and then import my site over. Hence, I transferred about eight years worth of blog posts to this site without much effort!
• I’ve bought an addon for my WordPress account which lets you use your own domain name – this is costing around £8 per year (USD 12).
• Finally, to be able to handle e-mail I’ve created an account with Google Apps (free for personal use), which means I get the benefits of GMail with my @phillsacre.me.uk e-mail address.