It’s funny that tonight I came across this posting at Trish’s Reading Nook in regards to what’s the deal with self-hosting because I’ve been debating that question lately.  The main reasons I’ve been considering it is because I’m getting a little (ok a lot) irritated that I can’t tweak the themes I’m using on my blog.  I like the two column look (although been debating moving to a three column theme) but I want my main content area to be a little wider with less white space on the left and right side.  From what I can tell if you use the free WordPress blogs you have to pay for the CSS Editing upgrade and pay a minor fee every month after that in order to do this.  If I’m going to pay might as well self-host?

The other thing that is ticking me off is I couldn’t add my LibraryThing or any other widget because the free WordPress won’t let you use javascript widgets due to security issues.  Then I tired using the enhanced image for my Amazon store but WordPress won’t let you use iFrames either.  Such a pain!

What has kept me from taking the plunge?

1. Figuring out who to go with?  I’m not the most computer saavy person so I would need something that is easy to set up and get my blog running.

2. I exported my blog awhile ago and tried testing importing it onto a server at work and got an error message that the file was too big to import.  I really don’t want to lose my old content.  I can’t figure out if this is a server set up issue or a self-hosting WordPress issue.  I found something on the forums about modifying php files but again I’m not really computer/server saavy so figuring this out might prove difficult.

3. When I look at my referrer information I get quite a few hits from en.wordpress.com/tag/xxx which I think only works on the free WordPress site?  So not sure how many hits I would lose going to self-hosted.

So what to do, what to do?  Honestly issues 1 & 2 are probably the biggest sticking points.  I could probably get help from co-workers on #1 but it would suck if I got my own site and then couldn’t import my past blog postings.  What do you guys think?  Should I take the plunge?  Have any of you moved from the free WordPress to a self-hosted WordPress site?