Whispers in the wind

For those of you curious about the site's theme change.. I've been toying with the idea of moving this blog, wholesale, over to a blog hosted on wordpress.com. While their functionality is extremely limited, for what I do with this particular blog, that may be more than adequate. This is one of the themes they have available, and the closest one to the one I was using, that I can get for free.

It's about cost-cutting.. really. The hosting I've got at hostgator doesn't really feel sustainable. While the cost of $47.50 a year seems manageable on the surface, the reality is just that it's actually pushing beyond what I can afford. Thankfully, the hosting I paid for won't expire until August of next year..  so I have a bit of time to prepare for that transition. The additional issue is that this blog rides on the coattails of the Eclectic-randomness site.. and trying to have two wordpress blogs under one domain name, will cost money. I've considered keeping zebragrrl.com for this blog, but the infrastructure behind the hosting for zebragrrl.com hasn't been updated in years, and installing wordpress there.. well it seems to be very difficult to keep the install up to date and functional.

Of course, I've also considered moving to another platform.. Blogger for one, seems to work fairly well. I've got a blog over there with a fairly nice setup. The downside there, is everything seems to be rolling into google+, and as someone who lives by her pseudonyms.. well I'm not welcome there. Tumblr is interesting, but it feels very limiting. The main deciding factor will be cost. Wordpress.com wants $18 dollars a year to maintain and use my domain through them, or I can continue paying GoDaddy for the domain (yes, I know) and then use the domain at Wordpress.com for just 13$ more. Blogger only wants $10 a year to act as registrar, but doesn't seem to charge at all if you're registering the domain someplace else. Tumblr also seems to not charge you to use a domain, provided you're using some other registrar, but they don't seem to provide a way to purchase a domain through them.

Or I can just let the domain expire. Which isn't really ideal, but at the same time.. eclectic-randomness.bloghostingsite.com or whatever, would be fine for my needs. The only places I really relied on the domain, were places where I wanted short urls for slurls to my shops.

But that's why the change. Trying to see how much I can tolerate it. It will mean some minor loss of functionality for the Eclectic-Randomness.com main site.. but I honestly doubt that anyone actually references the site very often, and the functions I'll lose are mostly the forever-unfinished products page, and the contact page, which only results in spam. We'll see how I feel about this as time goes on.