When I started this blog back in 2021 I did some research on blog platforms and WordPress was clearly the best out there. However, I chose Blogger because I wanted to use my own hostname, www.scottlerner.net. If you host your WordPress site on www.wordpress.com you can bring your own hostname, however you cannot do that with the free plan. At that point in time, I wasn’t ready to commit to a monthly recurring cost.
WordPress does offer the alternative option of downloading the software from www.wordpress.org and hosting it yourself. This was something I was definitely not willing to take on as I didn’t have the time to manage my own server. On top of the effort needed, it also comes with even greater costs compared to a paid plan on www.wordpress.com. Clearly this wasn’t an option for me.
A lot has changed over the past two years. For starters, we’ve more or less emerged from the pandemic and have resumed life as we knew it in 2019 and early 2020. More relevant to my blog is that Akamai (where I work) acquired Linode in March of 2022. Linode is a Cloud Computing company that offers Linux based hosting and much more. As a perk and encouragement to drink our own champagne, Akamai offers employees the ability to use the platform for personal usage. This removed my challenge of where to affordably host my own WordPress instance.
In the early part of my career I was a software developer. It’s been many moons since I was hands on keyboard doing programming or anything on the Linux command line other than simple tasks. I was daunted by the idea of starting all over again, but figured I should get started as a better way to understand this new offering we have at work.
I was amazed at how easy it was to set up my own instance on Linode. And the best part, there is a Market Place and WordPress is an app that Akamai offers. It was just a few clicks, a credit card, and the push of a few buttons to get my account started and WordPress installed. From there I could truly see how much more robust WordPress was compared to Blogger. It’s a night and day experience and I kind of regret not just starting with WordPress, however I might not have had the same journey if I had.
The most challenging part was figuring out how to get the site on SSL, a must for any website these days. I needed to figure out the right tools and I went with a combination of a WordPress Plugin, Really Simple SSL and certbot. The plugin offers a lot of functionality, including procuring and installing certificates. However, it can only install for a known set of providers and unfortunately, Linode wasn’t on their list. This just meant that I had to do some manual work to get the certificate installed on my webserver. This is where the command line tool certbot came into the picture. The process turned out to be less challenging than I expected using certbot, a step by step video on YouTube from Tony Teaches Tech, and the Linode documentation.
Migrating the blog over from blogger was as simple as an import and export. A few posts needed to be tweaked a slight bit, things like fixing image placement, nothing major. I was really happy to see it preserve the comments as well as the original posting dates for each blog entry.
Now that I’ve moved to a new and superior platform, I also plan to make more time to write posts. And I’m really glad that I got some hands-on experience with a new offering we have at Akamai.
