Looking Back
When I first started this blog about 15 years ago (!!!) I was hosting it on BlogSpot (now Blogger). Then, about 8 years later, I decided to change blog hosts because of some issues I was experiencing with BlogSpot. For the most part, this worked well for years. Over the last year or so, I have been experiencing a degradation in performance on my site. That said, I didn’t really feel like going through the motions to evaluate hosting platforms and moving my blog site yet again. That is, until now. :-)
I am currently looking at setting up another blog site (more on that in the future) so I decided it was time to find a new home. In the process, I decided to change the domain for this blog as well.
While the name of this blog has always been A Developer’s Life, the URL has been blog.devmatter.com (and devmatter.blogspot.com before that). I wanted a new domain that closely matched the name of the blog so I looked at options and noticed that the .life top-level domain (TLD) had been introduced several years ago. PERFECT! https://adevelopers.life was born!
Finding a New Host
Now that I had a new domain, it was time to find a new host. After a lot of research, I ended up settling on HostGator. One of the reasons I opted to go with HostGator is because I wanted a managed WordPress service – i.e. I didn’t want to install WordPress and MySQL and manage it; I wanted someone to do that for me so I could focus on the blog (and a few WordPress theme and configuration settings).
So far, all has been going well. The new site is much more responsive than the old site and I now have a few more options and services available to me that I didn’t have with my previous host (e.g. managed TLS certificates, email addresses, etc.).
Moving Day
Now that I had a new hosted WordPress site, I had a couple of immediate needs:
- Migrating my blog from the old host to the new host.
- Redirecting the old domain (blog.devmatter.com) to the new domain (adevelopers.life).
My new hosting service, HostGator, includes one free site migration as part of the hosting package I signed up for. However, I preferred to move the site myself so I had a better understanding of what all was in play. HostGator recommend a few WordPress plugins to help with the migration and I settled on one called Duplicator Pro. There is a free version but I opted for the paid version because it simplified part of the process and also offers the ability to perform scheduled backups.
The migration went smoothly – even with my old hosting site being someone performance-sensitive (I had to use the proprietary file format for Duplicator Pro because it is less processor intensive and works better for slower hosting sites). The plugin was successful in migrating everything – posts, images, pages, themes, plugins, etc.
With my blog site successfully migrated and live on https://adevelopers.life, I was left with the challenge of redirecting my old domain (https://blog.devmatter.com) to the new domain (https://adevelopers.life). I’ve done domain redirects before in the past so I figured this would be a snap!
I signed in to GoDaddy.com (I manage all my domain names there) and setup domain forwarding for devmatter.com:
And, for the most part, this works – but not completely. For example, the following URL redirects work:
- http://devmatter.com (NO SSL/TLS) properly redirects to https://adevelopers.life
- https://devmatter.com properly redirects to https://adevelopers.life
- http://www.devmatter.com (NO SSL/TLS) properly redirects to https://adevelopers.life
However, the following redirects do not work:
- https://blog.devmatter.com does not properly redirect to https://adevelopers.life but rather raised an error stating the “certificate is not valid for www.devmatter.com” (the old domain). This is the primary URL utilized for blog posts on the original WordPress site and what I really want to have work now.
- http://blog.devmatter.com (NO SSL/TLS) sort of properly redirect to https://adevelopers.life but goes to the specific URL https://adevelopers.life/blog-issues/. I have no idea why it jumps to this specific blog post. Some underlying WordPress mystery that I likely won’t spend much time trying to figure out ;-)
So, I’m still working through getting all the redirects working properly. My next step is to reach out to GoDaddy to see if they can offer any suggestions. I’m hoping there’s a simple solution that I’m just not yet aware of. I also posted this problem on Stack Overflow but have yet to receive any thoughts.
So, What’s Next?
Well, now that this blog has been re-hosted, I’ll get back to posting on a more regular basis. My next post (spoiler alert!) will cover the steps and resources I recently utilized to pass the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01) exam.
I mentioned above that I am also starting a new blog site. I won’t go into that right now but it is also a technology-related blog based on some of my current experiences and interests that I thought I’d have some fun sharing.
So, if you made it this far, thanks for reading! See you on the next update!