I converted to Wordpress, set up as a “website add-on” by my hosting company exactly a year ago. In that time, I’ve seen my traffic increase sixfold. Yay! I didn’t have very much to begin with (spoken with head bowed), so ramping it up x6 isn’t spectacular by problogging standards. Though modest by most definitions, it has definitely been headed in the right direction.

At some point, your blogging activities will either remain avocational, or they will begin a serious journey toward adulthood. Let’s say I am aiming for the latter, and have arranged my work day to allow for lots of studying.

Then, Kabam! Two weeks ago my host’s blog server was down every other day for a week. That decimated the traffic. Then after a week without incident, that troubled server actually crashed and had to be rebuilt. That’s a lot of blog woe.

My backups were intact, but the down time kills traffic you have worked to build.

With this host, I have appreciated about ten years of great service and little downtime on my other sites and those of many of my clients. When it comes to the blog, I see the the red flags waving, warning me it may be time to pack up and move Loosely Speaking to a new home.

Now I’m looking for advice.

Dailyblogtips says that you should always install at the root level.

The hosting company describes my setup this way: “Website Add-on. In this example, your blog would be set up as blog.yourdomain.com, where “blog” can be any name of your choosing.”

The blog folder is on a completely different server than my domain named website, so I think that IS root level. I don’t understand, though, the blog’s relationship to my actual website’s domain, though it fits the description in the paragraph above. In any case, my blog’s address is related to an existing domain name, but is not, itself, a domain named blog.

With this setup, can Loosely Speaking be moved without a name change and a bunch of redirects? Am I stuck with keeping it where it is?

Most of the how-to-move-your-WordPress-blog posts I have found (and there are tons) describe the process with the presumption that the blog has its own domain name. Download Squad provides great specificity, but like the other sources I looked at, doesn’t address the non-domain name matter.

If you are starting a new blog today, make sure it’s domain-named. If you are someone who has a similar setup, I’d sure like to hear from you.