@KeepYourPowderDry
Costs… pretty steep. Host with domain costs me about 90USD per year. The Squarespace subscription 20USD per month. I could not afford an annual plan right off the bat otherwise the monthly Squarespace cost would be 14USD per month.
Lessons learned, do proper research about your host for storage and domain, and choice of website host. I started out remaking the entire blog over at Wix. Loved it because it was very easy to drag and drop various site elements. I think I spend 5 days on it and was about done when I started to suspect that the pictures that I imported through URL from my host one.com/en to Wix took up storage over at Wix as well.
This was a problem since I knew Wix only had 10GB of storage on their site! And there was no way to increase it. Naturally for a picture heavy blog this is disaster. I had to resort to use the closest competitor SquareSpace even though I found their crafting tools less intuitive and more difficult to use. SquareSpace however has unlimited bandwidth and storage when you pick a premium plan.
Fortunately I could recycle pretty much all the site assets that I had created such as backgrounds, texts etc which had been saved on my desktop in a separate folder.
I briefly considered using the homepage option offered by by domain and storage host one.com/en . THe site would have been easy to craft, but they did not offer any option to integrate a blog to it. Instead you would have to use Wordpress, which is imo a very lackluster option and not that many steps above Blogspot.
My current problem is that once I connected all my DNS threads from one.com/en as a third party domain host with SquareSpace – I nuked all my image link from before. I don't know if I can fix that without interfering with my new site. I would have liked all my pictures to remain up on various forums but I guess that is a sacrifice that had to be made.
Finally, there is no proper way of importing posts from Blogspot to SquareSpace. I am manually copy/pasting text, doing a new layout and re-uploading pictures from my desktop. Fortunately, SquareSpace which has unlimited storage allows me to upload pictures in bulk straight from my desktop folders and I can even do some medium weight image editing through the site which can save time. I still use my AcdSee Pro software for picture editing most time though.
My hope is that once I get the new site rolling, there will be enough Patreon income to cover the costs of running the site.