If you dropped by THEBADBOOB.com in the last few days, you were likely confused and met with a fresh white page with broken links, no pictures, and a website void of the broody, cyberpunk landing zone I spent over a year creating. In my last post, I mentioned a migration process from wordpress.com to wordpress.org. Well let me tell you what happened. Because it’s fucking annoying and maybe I can help you avoid a problem.
If you’re like me, you didn’t know there was a difference between the two.
WordPress.com? WordPress.org? Must be the same. WRONG.
WordPress.COM is a hosted platform for page creation, blog posts, and website management. WordPress.COM is a website, meaning wordpress.com is HOSTED. Just like Medium.com pages live on Medium.com, or Facebook on Facebook. The website/blog lives on the rented land of wordpress.com, subject to Terms of Service and WordPress moderators.
The website is more “straight out of the box”. I go to wordpress.com, sign up, purchase or transfer a domain, or use the .wordpress.com address provided for free. And just like that, I’m posting, blogging, running a website, store, whatever. All I need is access to wordpress.com.
How does the website make money?
WordPress.com offers monthly/yearly plans, offering increased gigabytes for pictures or videos in your media library that appear on your blog, and sometimes a free domain for a year. Upgraded plans also allow access to plugins, access to themes, upgraded statistics, Google analytics, and access to further customization options at the least.
When starting a blog or website, I didn’t want any barriers to entry. I started with zero dollars and searched for the cheapest and most accessible methods to start running a site. I didn’t want to start a ‘blogger’ under Google. Tumblr. Yikes. Tumblr was bought by Yahoo in 2013 and my account was scrubbed from top to bottom. All posts and reposts, gone. To make matters worse, After changing ownership over the past decade, my Tumblr page was outright deleted. I’m not a fan of a website that changes on a dime, that puts content and art at risk of permanent deletion. A website that morphs entirely based on ownership, who’s in control.
What seemed like a safe archive was really a library of Alexandria.
After searching for a new platform, I stumbled upon Substack. The free speech champion of modern independent journalism. But after the lessons of Tumblr and witnessing the mass migration to and from X after Elon’s takeover, I was reminded of how fast things change. A free speech website one day, is a tyrannical overlord the next. See Youtube, in general. See the Twitter Files.
I loved Substack’s simplicity, minimalism, focus on content, and ability to draw an audience and build a community. Not to mention video uploads, podcasts and live streaming, live chats, a newsletter, and the big names on the platform like Matt Taibbi and Matthew Shellenberger. Substack does the heavy lifting for most writers who just want to wipe their hands of the website debacle. However, again, I’m renting land from somebody else. I don’t own my content and I’m subject to moderations, censorship, bans, shadow bans, and the like. While Substack has upheld their ethos over the years protecting free speech, including when pressed on my own content, I’m still hesitant to put my eggs in one basket. Also there’s a slight uniformity to the appearance. Everyone’s homepage appears the same. Drifting further from the peak possibilities experienced in the late nineties, early 2000’s in the sphere of web design. The creative control. The customization. The individuality. Substack held a few coloring tools and site arrangements, but essentially you’re stuck in the box.
That’s when I found wordpress.com, like I was saying earlier.
I used the free plan, using Nicholasrubinoff.wordpress.com as my domain.
The task appeared easy enough.
I’ll create a wordpress website, customize my own site, and I’ll have total creative control, I thought, My own site, my own rules, my own show. Impenetrable. Says here “WordPress is used by 43.5% of all websites on the internet”. Even better. WRONG. WRONG. STOP. IDIOT.
Fast forward a year and I’m being censored on WordPress.com as the moderators remove my blogs. It doesn’t matter I upgraded to the personal plan and received my own domain – Thebadboob.com. I’m still under the control of wordpress.com and a team of moderators.
Not to mention my art style involves graphic, fictional depictions of violence, sex, and content considered taboo. From my comics, to the pastel portraits, to the pending short stories, poems, short films, and animations; I plan on exploring what Jung called THE SHADOW.
The repressed and often darker aspects of humanity.
The cherry on top? My occasional political outbursts and claims of psychic activity (intuition), and comments on society, narcissism.
In the aftermath, THEBADBOOB.com required a safe host. Turns out wordpress.com isn’t my own show after all. Turns out the website still lives on somebody else’s server. Matt Mullenweg.
Enter WordPress.org.
WordPress.org is a free, open source code you download onto your computer. This download paired with a hosting provider’s plan, allows access to “self-hosting” capabilities. Meaning the site is YOURS. And free to move.
I wish I skipped wordpress.com all together.
Why?
First of all, as a high volume artist with tons of photographs, videos, paintings, drawings, whatever. The 6gb or 13gb plans provided by wordpress.com are easily fillable. After a year, I’ve maxed out the 6gb personal plan.
You’re going to save money buying a domain from Namescheap.com, Porkbun.com, Cloudflare.com, or Bluehost.com. And most providers will offer a domain free with the purchase of hosting services for a year.
Above you’ll see HostGator offers a free domain for a year with purchase of service, and charges $3.75 for the first month before charging $10.99 per month.
This deal buys you a domain for a year, plus you’ll have access to 10gb of storage instead of wordpress.com’s 6gb, including various tools from WordPress.com’s “Business Plan”: access to plugins, customization, premium themes, statistics, and more. All the benefits of switching to wordpress.ORG
BlueHost offers extreme deals on storage and monthly plans, incentivizing you to save money while taking your brand to the next level with a domain name and self-hosted site.
Furthermore, the website on wordpress.ORG is transferrable. Technically you’re not hosting the website yourself, but you’re taking your website and finding the rightful home. Somewhere you wont be harassed, censored, moderated, or suspended and banned. You build the website on wordpress.org’s software while hosting your service on a provider like HostGator or Blue Host. And if one day, HostGator or Blue Host doesn’t like your content, receives pressure to censor, faces security breaches, or outright goes under, the site doesn’t sink with the ship, you export to another hosting provider and start where you left off. This is the key. You don’t have to go through the painful process of transferring your site from wordpress.com to a wordpress.org format, something not attained easily by your computer normy.
The process of transferring from wordpress.com to wordpress.org is often manual, leaving broken media, links, pages, and blogs. The only way to avoid this grueling transition is buying the wordpress.com Business Plan for a month and using a plugin to transfer your site, or hire your new hosting provider to transfer the site for you. Or you know a computer programmer. Somebody who reads and writes code. Some hosting providers also offer the migration service for free upon service sign up. Worth looking into. The charge is usually around $100-$200.
This is my warning.
With the money I spent on WordPress.com’s Personal Plan and domain. The psychological torment of failing .xml file imports and site transfers. The need to purchase support. The inability to access the full features of WordPress like plugins, and not to mention the censorship – I regret starting with WordPress.COM.
Once your site lives in the WordPress.org format, it’s easy to transfer your blog/site from provider to provider due to plugins. The trouble is copying the WordPress.com site and importing the information into WordPress.org because wordpress.com doesnt have plugins unless you buy the most expensive plan. A customer representative from my hosting provider warned unless I utilized the transfer methods mentioned earlier, my entire site risks being void of media and content. Fuck.
The move to WordPress.ORG was inevitable and the process of transitioning was a major headache that cost days of my life. Routing, rerouting, moving domains, uploading and deleting the media library, realizing my entire site is broken, attempting a fix, realizing no fix exists, template and theme malfunctions, manual recoveries, bad advice, good advice, before eventually quitting and retuning to wordpress.com.
I don’t like accepting defeat, but here I am defeated.
So please, if you’re looking to start a blog or website:
Buy a cheap domain.
Find a cheap, reliable hosting provider.
(Often this is accomplished together)
Download WordPress.ORG and enjoy building your website.
Don’t get stuck on wordpress.com like me.
THE BADBOOB 