As I mentioned in part one, Squarespace was an excellent full-service host and offered an online WYSIWYG editor that shames even some stand-alone software. The real value of the Squarespace service is handling traffic surges and scaling at no extra charge. If you are looking to host a highly-trafficked blog, I highly recommend checking out Squarespace. Okay, let’s get to a discussion on my experience moving from Squarespace to a VPS.

WordPress theme. Before I started the transition, I was well-aware of what I was going to need. First of all, I needed to find a WordPress theme that suited my brand. I was very happy with the design I came up with at Squarespace, so I largely wanted to replicate that, while making the content more of the focus. Thanks to ThemeForest, I found a phenomenally customizable theme called BigFeature that was ideal. The price was right and for $25 I had a brand-spanking new theme that I could adjust to my liking.

WordPress configuration. Before I changed the Rural Technocrat nameservers I wanted to be sure that the theme and content would perform as I wished so I set-up a test directory under another domain. Installing WordPress could not be easier, especially when using Fantastico. My first step, after installation, was to move over my Squarespace content. Luckily, Squarespace allows all posts and comments to be exported to a Movable Type file, which can then be imported into WordPress. This worked extremely well and within minutes my content was accessible.

Similarly, installing the purchased theme was a very easy task. The account panel at ThemeForest allows you to download the theme package whenever needed. A simple upload to the WordPress themes folder was all that it took to go from bland to grand! I must say that the developer of the BigFeature theme has made it extremely easy to fully-customize the look and feel of his theme.

Transition from test to deployed. At this point I had a fully-functioning WordPress installation with all of my Squarespace posts and comments as well as a beautiful new theme. Unfortunately, this was installed on a test domain, so it was time to transition it to the new Rural Technocrat account on my VPS. Overall, this process took a few hours, but that was largely due to my inability to differentiate between ‘wrdp’ and ‘wdrp’. Here are the steps that one should follow when replicating a WordPress installation.

1. Export the current MySQL database to a .SQL file. Use phpMyAdmin to do so.
2. Backup the entire contents of the test server (well, everything related to WordPress).
3. On the new server, create an empty MySQL database and then import the previous .SQL file using phpMyAdmin.
4. Move the backed-up contents to the new server.
5. Edit the wp-config.php to reflect the new database name/user/password.

Nameserver change. Assuming that you did not want to risk downtime, now is time to change the domain nameservers to that of your current host. Keep in mind that replication will take up to 24 hours and do not forget to add the MX records so that you don’t lose your email!

Issues. It may seem like everything went very smoothly for me, but there were a few minor hiccups. First, exporting to Movable Type format from Squarespace does not bring over the blogroll, images, or even tags. So far I have replaced the links, but it will be a drawn-out process to deal with the images and ad-formatting. Secondly, as I mentioned above, I thought I was transferring both the database and WordPress files incorrectly as I always had a database error. If only I knew that ‘wrdp’ is not the same as ‘wdrp’. Finally, I am generally an impatient person so waiting for DNS flushes and nameserver updates was a tedious task to handle.

Overall, I am very satisfied with the transition. By maintaining a VPS I can grow the number of websites that I can host so it just made sense to transition to WordPress for my personal blog. It has been about three years since I used WordPress last and let me tell you – it is AMAZING!