Jeai-cArlos Cl. Tee

This story is an example of my incessant behavior to constantly alter my environment, forcing it comply to whatever I perceive as perfection. It becomes almost like an obsession as it has taken hours of staring into the monitor, typing, searching and choosing this or that. It’s about how this blog has gotten around the web and settled, going through three hosts and four domain names.

In other words, y’all can use this post as a guide when you want to start with your first blog or site, whichever you might want to do. Learn from my mistakes people! :D

At first, I just wanted a blog, not caring whether or not anyone will ever read it, but it has got to be a WordPress blog. So! Screening all the free WordPress blog hosting out there, I found two contenders — WordPress.com and Blogetery. Well, WordPress.com is WordPress.com, a premiere free and premium host for all sorts of bloggers out there. It’s stable, every blogger knows about it, has a global tag cloud and fairly easy to use. But Blogetery? It’s something new. Like WordPress.com, it offers blogs that take seconds to deploy but without Wordpress.com Stats and Akismet. You can, however, make use of Google Analytics in place of Wordpress.com Stats. Their main difference is that in Blogetery, you get to have 90% of the Google AdSense income generated from your blog! That means you get to make money off your stupid online rantings.

The verdict?

I don’t know if I had to much coffee or something, but I chose — despite what my judgment should have been then — Blogetery!

Okay, okay! So why Blogetery? It was all about the money. So get to use AdSense, right? And Analytics is there in place of Stats. 90% cut? Fair enough! Soon after, it was “Good Enough for Me.” Or, so I thought.

The ads were, as I looked at them more, eyes sores and not to mention useless. It’s a personal blog for God’s sake! Don’t need ‘em. That’s strike one. Strike two,they don’t have a layout that’s clean and simple. The closest that comes to my preference is a template fine-tuned for a multi-author environment, but my blog isn’t multi-authored, is it? Finally, I get that vibe that I don’t wanna stay with Blogetery, so at strike three, after only 8 posts, it’s out!

Okay! With Blogetery out of the way, it’s only natural to move to WordPress.com, right? Right!

It was easy enough to do it. I just exported my posts, categories and attachments right into an XML file and imported them into my newly created WordPress.com blog.

The thing that’s great with WordPress.com is that your blog gets to be included in a global tag cloud. A good source for traffic since my blog is pretty young. With that, it’s free plus like I said, you get Stats and Akismet. And I did find a nice template I can be comfortable with.

WordPress.com is a great site for newbie bloggers starting out, but obviously, I didn’t stay with them. Why? Well, it was frankly, too easy. I wanted something that’s worth the challenge of setting up and maintaining. I couldn’t customize it as much as I wanted to,choosing templates that I like and plug-ins that really matter or are just plain cool. Only premium accounts get to do that and I don’t have any means of upgrading my blog.

So now, WordPress.com is spent. Where to go from there? Set-up my own WordPress blog at a free hosting site! The first step? Chose that free hosting site, and there are hundreds of them! Now I won’t exhaust this post on all of them, but I did get to try two: 000webhost.com and 10gbfreehost.com.

I looked for a free web hosting that had no ads, was reliable, and supported PHP, MySQL that’s okay with WordPress. It also needed to have sendmail enabled because WordPress needed to send various notifications. The hosting with all these features which had the biggest web space offering and looked decent enough is 000webhost.com. They offer 250 MB space, 100 GB bandwidth, unlimited sub-domains, 5 MySQL databases, POP3, a beautiful admin interface, dependable and professional support, and everything else that taste good because they are all free.

I spent a couple of days trying out templates, after which I settled with one that looked clean, organized and timeless. I also changed title to “Jeai-cArlos Cl. Tee,” my own name. I had to change it, the original title didn’t exactly point to me.

Moving into the site, I experience a couple of downtime lasting 15 - 30 minutes. Then a few more times later that week, at one time lasting for 2 hours. And even when I was about to publish this post, the site went down for a few minutes! Bummer! Anyways, at some point, it got to my nerves. I started looking for alternative hosting.

Then I found 10gbfreehost.com. Obviously, the biggest kink to that is the huge web space your getting — 10 GIGabytes. But, as good as that sounds, I didn’t like the hosting. The administration panel sucked and as not loaded as in 000webhost. I didn’t even get to use phpMyAdmin. And, their site looked like it was done with minimal designing and didn’t even looked corporate to me. I felt suspicious thinking that it was a scam. And, their forum was a ghost town. I deleted my account soon enough.

With that affair lasting only a few hours, I went back sobbing to 000webhosting.com. :’(

Anyways, I’ve stayed with 000webhosting since then. But, I did make one tiny change. I dropped “jeaikz09” and settled with “ca7l0s-9.” I felt that the former was out of date but that’s a whole other post.

For now, this blog is known as “Jeai-cArlos Cl. Tee” hosted at 000webhost.com with the sub-domain ca7l0s-9.890m.com. Maybe later, I get to buy out ca7l0s-9.com and direct that to my 000webhost.com site or to a cheap web hosting instead.