Would You Ever Move Your Websites to Another Host?

Recently I decided to move my websites from the Wealthy Affiliates hosting platform to my own self-hosted platform. I did this, for one main reason: FREEDOM.

Let me get this out there... I LOVE WEALTHY AFFILIATES... and I'm not leaving. I just want a little more control over my sites, and there are a few things they just won't let me do.

You see, I manage, curate and post to over 15 blogs. 3 of which I setup on wealthy affiliates when I got started here. At the time, I was interested to see the value of having them on wealthy affiliates versus my own hosting package.

Now 6 months later, the ONLY difference between my self hosted blogs and the wealthy affiliates blog is the "comment exchange" NOT the give and take thread... but the Comment Exchange application where you earn points by leaving comments, and those points can then be used to request comments. You can't ask for comments on a site that is self hosted.

AGAIN, this is NOT the give and take thread... this is something else.

So, why would I go self-hosted? Quite Simply ... Wealthy Affiliates will NOT let me use the plugin ManageWP OR Jetpack.

(I know I sound like a brat... but both of those two plugins make my life sooooo much easier)

Jetpack is a big application with a lot of really great tools. Like Publicize which links to all your social media so you post in your blog and it populates twitter, facebook, pinterest and more.... and there are so many other things ... (read more here on Chris Lema's blog post about it: http://chrislema.com/wordpress...) BUT you can't use it on wealthy affiliates because it's more like a plugin container... and if someone were to activate ALL of the plugins within the jetpack container... well, it will slow down your site. (technically not a jetpack issue because if you were to independently install all those plugins you'd get the same result)

ManageWP is a centralized place to manage backups, security, updates and more for ALL of your wordpress sites in one area. It's a web-based application that links to your plugin and pulls information out to the web-based application. Wealthy Affiliates doesn't like it because of the interconnection and the way it communicates back and forth. They won't allow that kind of access on their site because they can't maintain the security control. When I asked them about another backup solution, they told me one... but I would have had to go to each site to install, and go to each site to manage and run.

(So, here's me.... thinking... hmmm.... I can go to one site and manage ALL of my sites... or I can log into all of my sites one at a time and manage them... I know... still feeling a little bratty)

I have lived without Jetpack for 6 months... but the ManageWP was the thing that made me evaluate whether I really needed my sites hosted on Wealthy Affiliates.

I don't.

Having said that... It's not easy to transfer a site (whole) without having to recreate everything nearly from scratch. However, with the help of The Duplicator plugin and the people at Siteground (www.tinyurl.com/siteground1 my favorite hosting company) it was easy.

AND I'm not making this decision lightly... because I wanted to do it myself my sites were down for about 8 hours.. and in one case 2 days... but when they came back up... they looked just the same.

To be clear. I'm not going anywhere. Wealthy Affiliates and You guys (the community) are so encouraging and activating that I can't imagine not being able to check in and see how everyone is doing.

Share my successes, share my challenges...

I just need a little more freedom when it comes to my sites.

I guess I'm writing so that you will know it's possible. So that you will know you don't HAVE to have your site here on wealthy affiliates and moving your site doesn't mean that you don't love it here!

Have an amazing day.

Wenda