Ever since I moved to a WordPress blog under GoDaddy hosting I’ve had numerous problems with poor performance. I suspect this has much to do with the shared resources used for that hosting account and several posts on the Web appear to support this belief. Regardless, I decided to do something about it that would actually make a difference. I had already tried running a cache plugin and database optimizer (for several months) and didn’t see an improvement. Updating the blog and looking for errors sometimes took a very long time – I often had to wait several seconds just for a page to load or update.

I considered upgrading to a Virtual Private Server but the extra cost just wasn’t acceptable, especially considering I would have done it only to get this blog running properly. The base VPS hosting would have cost about $30/month and I would have added a Plesk console, which would have bumped it up to $35/month.

After mulling over my options for about an hour I decided to go with an alternative. Since most of my activity with this domain is just infrequent blogging I decided to sign up for a WordPress.com account and pay extra to use my own subdomain and not have any ads. The total cost was somewhere around $50 for the year – far less than moving to a VPS would have cost.

It’s only been a day since I moved to this blog but I’m already much happier. The blog has operated smoothly. There are a few other restrictions (I can’t use plugins that aren’t already available to this account, only certain themes are available, and CSS editing is an additional charge). However, those restrictions are not major issues for me.

I’ve cleaned up bad links that were a result of the move. The old blog is still active. I’ve setup a few redirects but I’m planning to put more in place for other posts that receive visits. Eventually, I’ll delete the old blog.