Although I’ve been friends with Gary Jones from BlueFur Web Hosting for a few months now, I haven’t really made use of their hosting services until just recently. In fact, I didn’t purchase a hosting plan from BlueFur until I launched my fighting games blog. Well, seeing how even their cheapest hosting plan (the one I have) allows for an unlimited number of domains, I decided to finally migrate Beyond the Rhetoric over to their servers.

While I review all sorts of technological gizmos, I’m not as well-versed when it comes to coding and migrating websites. As such, I wasn’t 100% confident about the process of moving this blog (and my freelance writing site) from Dreamhost over to BlueFur. I asked for Gary for some instructions and it seemed simple enough.

As far as I can tell, the propagation is currently happening and I should have completely migrated within the next 24-72 hours. If you come across any strange 404 errors or other mishaps, please contact me. Also, if you’ve posted a comment in the last couple of days and it’s not showing up, it probably means that it’s stuck on the old server. Feel free to re-iterate your thoughts.

Along with the new hosting plan that I have with BlueFur, I also signed up for their affiliate program. Based on my experience thus far and the experience of other BlueFur customers (Ed Lau and John Chow are probably two of their better-known clients), I highly recommend BlueFur for all of your web hosting needs. Their servers are incredibly speedy (much faster than Dreamhost and GoDaddy in handling dynamic content) and uptime is absolutely top notch.

It’s not like I’m going to leave you guys with no incentive either. As part of their affiliate program, I am able to offer you a 10% discount off any hosting package. Simply enter the coupon code ilovepandas to receive your discount. It’ll automatically be taken off of your total bill.

Migrating the WordPress blog to a new server was actually a lot less painful than I thought it was going to be. Naturally, transferring my static freelance writing site (MichaelKwan.com) was basically a cut-and-paste effort. I’ll write a dummy’s guide to migrating WordPress blogs soon; I know I would have appreciated one.

On a semi-related note, I’d like to thank Matt for concocting some custom code for me. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’ve ditched the fugly .aspx extension on all of my posts, opting for a more universal WordPress permalink scheme. Old backlinks still work because they’ve been redirected to the new URLs. Thanks Matt! I owe you big time.