I’ve recently migrated my blogs away from Posterous which is closing as of 30th April 2013. I had several blogs with Posterous and the following points were why I went to Posterous in the first place:

• Ease of posting via email (not some strange email you had to remember, simply post something to yourblogname@posterous.com from the email ID you had registered with – great stuff).
• Free usage of own domains with A record redirect. That means I could keep controlling the nameservers of my domain and didn’t have to hand that over to a 3rd party.
• Simple distribution by auto-posting content on other blogs and social media.
• Flexibility and control to configure blog followers, editors, admins etc.
• Administer all blogs centrally from one place.
• Make some blogs private.

With the Posterous closure I was forced to make a decision where to move my blogs. There are many great services out there and I looked at quite a few of them, but to me two really stood out:

1. WordPress
2. Tumblr

WordPress is significantly more complex than Posterous is, but also infinitely more powerful. If you use your blog from a business perspective, WordPress is a really good choice. I’m lacking none of the above mentioned functionality – in fact I probably got more. The only downside is that I now suddenly have to pay $13/year to have my own domain name (+ have to give away control for the related nameservers) which I don’t like of course.

Tumblr is much more simpler than WordPress and lacks many of the powerful features WordPress offers you out of the box. However, it is therefore significantly easier to use, has plenty of cool designs that hardly need adjustments to look great and it even offers a free version to use your own domain name (same concept as Posterous had). Tumblr is also easy to set up for a private blog, i.e. people have to enter a password before they can see the content on the pages.

The export from Posterous went very smooth (I really suggest you back up well before the 30th April!) though it took a few hours until the downloads were ready and – more importantly – I was never notified that they were. So better you go and check manually if they are available for download.

The bigger difficulty was getting my stuff into WordPress and Tumblr. Initially I tried it myself and played around with a bunch of so called import/export tools, but ultimately gave up. That’s when I found Import2 – which is a really cool service to migrate your Posterous blogs (and a whole lot of other stuff, too).

For a small fee (not a fortunate) they not only migrated my entire blog over to Tumblr but also securely backed up any files I had previously uploaded on Posterous in a personal Dropbox directory. Before ordering the service and once after I had a question and got instant responses each time (we’re talking minutes here, not hours), so support is also great.

The whole transfer to Tumblr with Import2 took around 30-40 minutes which is nothing considering the number of posts and images I had up there. Downloading the stuff back to my Dropbox took more time :)

For WordPress I went with the manual import option (uploading the downloaded file from Posterous) which worked perfectly well, too.

I hope you enjoy my new blog here and a big thanks to Import2 and WordPress to making this a smooth experience.