Okay, so I had a chance to do some more research. I looked at the pricing of getting a new hosting package with my current provider for 2-years and dropping out the reseller program. Since I am already paid into the program until April 2014 I would get a refund for the remaining 3-years which would mean I would come out ahead a couple dollars. Interestingly, though if I purchased hosting through my reseller site I could get 3-year for less than the 2-year of my current provider. I could still drop out of the program though and keep my hosting plan. My account would just be converted over to the in-house company that handles defunct resellers.

However, I know from my experiences working in Hosting Support that there is a big downfall to this. While technically the hosting is with another company it is still within the same network and therefore I would have to manually update the DNS (where my domains point) for every site I am hosting. It is not as simple as changing the name servers as I would have to go into each domain and update the IP address. In theory, the only time I should have to do this is when I first move everything over. However, in the event that my hosting account has to be migrated due to overload (not very likely being it would be on the more robust Grid servers) over issues with the particular server I am on (though rare computers and hard drives can crash once in a while) I would have to go through the process again. Plus, as any web developer will tell you, it is a pain trying to manage a website when the domain and hosting are in two different places. May be that wouldn’t be so bad after all as I would still be getting a good deal on the hosting. But then I start thinking about the migration…yikes!

So that got me thinking about the $12 a year WordPress.com charges to map my own domain to my blog. Not a bad deal when I think about it. I was going to register the domain ffextensiongurublog.com, but then after looking at the name in the shopping cart I decided it was just too long. Then I remembered I had registered ffextensionguru with multiple extensions (.biz, .com, .info, .net, .org, .us and .co.uk) for SEO purposes as well as to protect my name. So I had decided I’ll go ahead and connect ffextensionguru.net to my Firefox Blog (just as I have emailmafia.net connected to my Thunderbird Blog). However, when I was reading up on what I needed to do on the WordPress.com site I discovered they now allow the mapping of sub-domains. That means I can have blog.ffextensionguru.com point to my WordPress blog (it does now, but it just forwards to ffextensionguru.wordpress.com).

Well, that certainly made things simpler. I am able to keep my Firefox Blog where it is, and have my (sub) domain attached to it instead of the standard wordpress.com address. The $12 a year is defiantly worth it, not having to move everything. The new Email Mafia Blog should be live shortly as should the new ElGuru.me site.