Exactly one year ago, in the wee hours of the morning, I decided that it was time to transition to a WordPress self-hosted blog. To my delight, g-liu.com was open, and I quickly purchased the domain from WordPress.com. Ever since then, I’ve run my personal website and blog here.
However, setting up hosting for g-liu.com got off to a rocky start. Not wanting to pay for hosting, I decided to go with a free webhost, namely 000webhost. Even setting up the WordPress install for the first time was nerve-wracking, as the host’s servers seemed to hail from the dinosaur age. After the initial fiasco, G-liu.com ran smoothly for the next few months. One day, however, my blog had a stroke and fell into a coma.
For a good month-and-a-half, I could not post to the blog, thanks to a faulty WordPress upgrade. It wasn’t WordPress itself that caused the problem, but rather the terrible PHP configuration done by 000webhost. At this point, I almost considered deleting my blog and abandoning it for good.
In the end, I didn’t. This blog had meant a lot to me and it would be rash to delete years of hard work. I gathered my strength once more and attempted to fix the blog.
After I performed a fresh install of WordPress, the PHP errors went away and all was well. But that was the last time that I would put up with 000webhost’s minefield of issues. Thus began the search for affordable, reliable paid hosting.
A new everything
A week after the miraculous recovery of my blog, I found MyUnixHost.com (MUH), a home-grown web hosting company run by Aaron Graves. Switching to MUH was painless on my part. Aaron graciously moved all of my files, set up the blog, and provided me a $5 hosting credit. Since then, there have been no major problems.
During the summer a few weeks after the transition, I completely overhauled the front page of my website, and customized a theme for this blog. It was a valuable experience building a website from scratch.
Before I knew it, sophomore year started for me at the University of Washington, the year in which I would really start delving into my majors. As usual, I continued to blog and maintain the website. In late November, I received an email from a marketing company, indicating their interest in publishing a guest editorial on this blog. This was in fact, the first time I had received such an offer. The result was a great blog post on cloud storage services.
Approaching the one-year anniversary of g-liu.com, I decided that it was finally time to depart for a new domain registrar. With all due respect to WordPress.com, I transferred the registration of g-liu.com to Hover Domains LLC.
Where are we now?
A year after registering g-liu.com, I can’t but say that this website has proven to be hugely valuable. It’s helped me land a job, given me a canvas to practice my web development, and as always, provided me a platform to write to a global audience.
Getting this website was a goal that I’ve had ever since starting my blog. Even though I’ve attained that goal, there will always be much to do. Like a garden, a good website requires continual care and maintenance. It is my best wishes that this young garden will enjoy the years to come.