I am contemplating moving to a self-hosted blog. Not because Wordpress.com falls short of anything, just that I have become greedier. I want to control more and want to experiment more.
I will definitely continue with Wordpress. It has achieved the privileged milestone of one million downloads and is coming up with some dynamic features. Wordpress.com too has seen massive growth, it hosts 310 thousand blogs on its first birthday. Wordpress.com has time and again shown that it is one of the highest quality blogging sites, with lot of high traffic and slashdottable blogs.
I want to dig deeper now, get more control and start some experiments. The new avataar will also host some projects and some personal stuff. After some research I have narrowed down to bluehost.com, dreamhost.com and mediatemple.net for hosting with a bias towards bluehost. Feel free to suggest if you have any information regarding this. I am looking at PHP, Ruby and Python support. Any kind of guidance will be appreciated.
I am trying to evaluate the costs of moving, some are apparent and I am sure some will raise their head later. Right now though, none of the disadvantages are heavy enough to outweigh the basic advantage of being able to do more with self-hosted Wordpress for me.
Technorati tags: wordpressdotcom, wordpress.com, hosting, moving blog
Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.
August 18th, 2006 at 8:34 am
I am running few WordPress websites hosted by Bluehost. If you are looking to move, choose a hosting provider that offers WordPress instalation via “fatastico” scripts. This way you do not need to play with .htaccess files in order for custom permalinks to work. Good luck.
August 18th, 2006 at 8:36 am
I feel a little like a parent bird watching her fledgling fly off into the great wilderness.
I know you will twist and bend WordPress to your will and creative imagination and I will look forward to full reports on your successes as well as your failures, as we learn so much from both. Often more from the failures.
Make sure you let me know where you move to. I’ll still be watching!
August 18th, 2006 at 8:51 am
Vlad, thanks for the suggestion. I think dreamhost and bluehost both provide fantastico, mediatemple uses its homegrown installation tools.
Lorelle, I will definitely update you with my moving. Whether I move or not I will still be hooked on to Lorelle On Wordpress
August 21st, 2006 at 10:37 pm
[...] This is where I have landed from my very first blog. Wordpress.com is an excellent service, it was just that I wanted to try more. However, the fact is that I have been spoiled by my earlier blog which was auto-managed (atleast for me). Now I have to look at a host of things, right from SEO to statistics to plugins. It is still very satisfying to create my own theme which targets my requirements. Being able to customize Wordpress completely gives a lot of conviction. [...]