I’ve been playing around with my own hosted version of WordPress. I’m a technical nerd just as much as a writer, so the lure of custom CSS and designing my own graphics was hard to resist.
While it is exciting to have so much control over the site, I’m finding the transition less smooth than I had anticipated. By leaving WordPress.com, I’m leave behind the community as well. I lose my chances of beingFreshly Pressed. I lose my connections to the community who first starting reading my brain oozlings. Worst of all, I lose all of my subscribers (thank you to everyone who has subscribed to date!).
I can setup subscription on my hosted site as well, but there is no way to migrate the WordPress subscribers to my new domain. Very sad. It keeps me from flipping the switch and making the move final.
Anyway, the draft of my redesign is up at: https://literatureandlibation.com/
I’m still tweaking some layout options and working on the navigation, but I’m pleased with how it looks so far.
Anyone else made the move from WordPress.com to self-hosting? Was it worth it? Any advice to a self-hosting newbie?
Literature and Libation 
The new site looks very good and I can certainly empathize with your dilemma. You have so much more control when you’re building your own solution, but you do lose some of the community aspects. You almost require a preexisting community that can easily follow you over.
I have a separate technical blog that I host – http://blog.humanmodem.com/. It hasn’t been updated in ages, but I definitely enjoyed the customization features and I’d like to go that way again with my writing blog…but I definitely need to build an audience using the socialization tools wordpress.com provides.
Best of luck to you, whatever way you choose to go!
Hi, I’m experiencing the same issue as yourself. I’ve build up a community of 700+ followers on my blog <a ref="http://wilkes888.wordpress.comhttp://wilkes888.wordpress.com.
PR agencies have strongly advised me to change to a self hosting so that I can use Google Analytics to provide them with proper stats. (E.g. Unique visiters, which I WordPress Stats doesn’t track)
I’ve also been advised by other bloggers to go to self hosted to use the add-ins so I don’t waste so much time doing repetitive mundane tasks such as manually setting the “featured image” on every single blog post.
Right now I’m toying with creating a ‘hack’ so that I any posts to a self hosted site will ‘mirror’ the post my wordpress.com site. In that way I hope to retain the WordPress.com community an current subscirbers, but all new email based subscirbers will be directed to my new self hosted site.
You wrote this post in 5 months ago in March. How do the migration go?
I had a smallish following at the time and thought it made sense to try things on my own. I spent about 10 hours building my new site, transferring the data over and playing around with settings.
Ultimately, I stayed with WordPress.com because of the community and the ease of use. It may seem like you get more freedom with self-hosted, but it comes with a whole other slew of requirements (like getting an Akismet license and diligently marking spam, finding/buying/building your own theme, listing yourself in blog directories and keeping them up to date, etc.) that really add up to a lot of maintenance time.
I am a technical nerd by trade, but I still found it to be a lot of extra work that didn’t match the payoff. It may be right for some people, but for those of us who value our writing time, it may be just as worthwhile to stick with the WordPress.com setup.
I don’t find it too cumbersome to set my featured images, and really haven’t seen a lot of drawbacks except for the HTML and CSS inflexibility. You can setup Google Webmaster Tools for a better look into your site stats, but I still have yet to find an elegant way to get Analytics to work.
You could use a DNS redirect to try and move your traffic, but there are other implications to consider before trying to implement that. If I figure anything out, I’ll let you know!
Thanks for your thoughts Oliver,
It’s getting very frustrating as I’ve now been told that running a double website will give me massive penalties on Google.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/automatically-duplicate-posts-to-wordpresscom-site?replies=3
Also I’ve been told that syndicating my posts to WordPress.com will get my account deleted!
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/automatically-duplicate-posts-from-my-self-hosted-to-my-wordpresscom-site?replies=7#post-976527
I’m effectively using Worldpress as a photojournalist covering new
restaurant/bar.food venue openings. So speed is key for me, posting up 6 photos with comments while I’m sat in the venue is quite difficult if you’re trying to do little things like setting the “featured image”. Especially as it can’t be done from the iPad app.
I’m coming to the same conclusion as you, although the issue of not being about to use Google Analytics seems to be a little more serious for me as I’m being asked for my Google Stats by PR agencies.