Blog hosting is a serious issue regarding a blog’s traffic. A fast and reliable server is preferred so that the visitors surf your blog comfortably. Lately my gambling blog had trouble concerning the loading speeds and I decided to change its servers and also upgrade from Joomla 1.0.15 to the new Joomla 1.5.4. So, I moved the blog and changed my hosting company. It sure wasn’t that easy and since it was my first time of moving a website I came across some difficulties. However the result is very promising.

I have been a GoDaddy’s customer for some years and had no major complaints. I have designed more than 4 or 5 websites up to now which were all hosted to them. This winter I considered web designing more deeply and created a big website with a friend of mine. We devoted many days searching for the best possible layout, hosting company, registrar, content management system and forum system. I was responsible of finding the best hosting provider and I ended up to Hostgator. They have been hosting our website since February and we are very satisfied. That’s why I had no doubts where I should move Jimmakos Sports Blog.

Since I was transferring my blog to them, I thought to upgrade to Joomla 1.5 as well. I had no trouble at all with that, moving the databases from the previous edition and converting them to the new ones. My biggest issue was search engine friendly URLs and maintaining the same links from my original sports blog. That took me about 3 days to manage it, and I can’t be happier with the final result. I moved the entire website to a new server, running on the latest Joomla release and every link working just like it previously did. That means no penalty from search engines, maintaining the same page rank throughout the site, working inbound and outbound links, and no troubles with the ad campaigns.

The most obvious effect to the readers is undoubtedly the fast loading time of the home page. I honestly can’t get enough refreshing the front page! I also researched a little about search engine optimization (SEO) and have made some new not so apparent additions which hopefully will help the blog to get more traffic. I will write a follow-up on that matter in the following days.

However, everything didn’t go so well, there were a couple of casualties. First of all, all the comments are gone. Fortunately they weren’t many but comments are extremely valuable to a blog’s community popularity. I wasn’t able to save them though, and having a new comment system installed, an improved, faster and more reliable one, I hope to read more comments from my readers. Forum is also gone. The forum system I had installed wasn’t that compatible with Joomla 1.5 (it is supported running in legacy mode, but I’m running the entire website in 1.5 native mode) and opted to uninstall it, although I have kept all the messages and structure of it. Registered users are fortunately moved successfully and can access the registered section of my website as they did before.

Apart from that, new additions include full Greek language support (you can check it out in the control panel on top of the page), new Links section and a better organized blog altogether.

If you have a gambling blog or generally a blog of some kind, contact me to include it in the Links and until then, you can test the comment system below!