After seven years of building, documenting, and sharing through Mixster on mixstersite.wordpress.com, I have made a significant transition to mixster.dev, a hosted WordPress installation on Hostinger. Here’s how I did it!
When Life Gets in the Mix
Eight years ago, I started Mixster as a reflection of everything happening in my life-the sum creation of all that was happening in the mix, while I was living in the mix. I wanted a platform to share my thoughts and document my journey without having to engineer yet another blog platform from scratch. WordPress.com seemed like the perfect solution at the time.
Years passed by, Mixster evolved into a docs initiative that enables startups, organizations, and companies to “right” their docs, engineering culture, and product experience. The WordPress.com platform served as a reliable foundation during those formative years, allowing me to focus on content creation rather than infrastructure management.
The Limitations of WordPress dot com
As my vision expanded, I began to feel the constraints of WordPress.com’s hosted environment. While WordPress.com offers convenience in Personal plans, it comes with significant limitations unless you’re willing to pay premium fees:
- Limited access to WordPress plugins, which are only available on Business plans or higher costing $25 per month
- Restricted theme options, with premium and third-party themes only available on Premium plans or higher
- Inability to modify CSS and make custom design tweaks without upgrading
- The presence of WordPress.com’s own advertising on free plan content
- Constraints on building community features and interactive elements
These limitations became increasingly frustrating and got in the way. I wanted to create a more immersive experience, implement custom features, and truly make the platform my own-all of which required the freedom that only self-hosting could provide.
Embracing the Open Source Philosophy
The decision to move to a different hosted WordPress installation on mixster.dev aligns perfectly with the open source philosophy that has always been at the core of Mixster. WordPress itself is free and open-source software licensed under GPLv2. The CMS runs about 22% of all sites on the internet as of 2024. Ideally to start writing using WordPress, you have two options.
- Hosted providers: WordPress.com, Hostinger, DreamHost
- Self hosting: Any compute instance provider, Linode, DigitalOcean etc.
I chose to go with Hostinger as my hosted WordPress provider (Referral Link) and have been using it for the past 6 months.
Process of migration to a new Hosted WordPress Provider
The two things, you need to pre-select to make your migration happen are a domain and hosting provider. In my case, the domain and hosting was with wordpress.com. Here’s the steps I took broadly:
- I moved my mixster.dev domain in February 2025 to Cloudflare Domains.
- Cancelled my wordpress subscription, and delisted it from search engines.
- Exported all articles, author data and media
- Downloaded all subscription data of members for my newsletter
- Onboarded on Hostinger’s hosted offering and created a new instance.
- Setting up Hostinger was a breeze on the server end.
- Their migration guide was incredibly helpful. Video.
- Connected mixster.dev to my instance
- Imported the data dumps to WordPress, let the new instance auto-import all media
- I had 1.3 GB of media which took about 7 hours to be imported to Hostinger.
- Installed the Jetpack plugin to import my subscriber’s list into. It can’t import more than 100 subscribers.
- Imported subscribers to Buttondown and added a subscribe button.
- Used extensions to remove duplicates and improve formatting
- Several missing plugins when importing from WordPress.com which had to be resolved.
- Once completed, chose a new theme. Customized it – which took days alone.
- Connected site to Google Analytics, Search Engine consoles, added Search engines site-verification
- Reviewed all wordpress settings, all plugin settings, setup litespeed cache, numerous tweaks needed everywhere.
Future @ mixster.dev
With the new self-hosted platform, I’ll be able to:
- Install any of the 59,000+ free WordPress plugins to extend functionality
- Implement custom themes and designs that better represent the Mixster brand
- Make direct code changes when necessary
- Create a truly unique experience without artificial limitations
- Build community features that foster deeper engagement
The core of what Mixster stands for remains unchanged-helping organizations improve their documentation, engineering culture, and product experience-but the means to deliver on that promise will be significantly enhanced.
Thank You for Being Part of the Journey
To everyone who has followed Mixster’s journey on over the past eight years, thank you. Your support, engagement, and feedback have been invaluable in shaping what Mixster has become.
I’m excited about this new chapter and hope you’ll continue to follow along at mixster.dev. Please update your bookmarks, RSS feeds, and any links to ensure you don’t miss any future content. The mixstersite.wordpress.com site will be closing down soon, so making this transition is important to stay connected.
That’s it for now. Live in the mix.