Till then it will be business as usual just with a lot more late nights.

I think everyone is offering good advice. Don't get me wrong.

The thing is, for me, I'm a bit of a control freak and somewhat of a perfectionist, so not being able to build my blog the way I really want to has always bugged me. Yes, content is king and always will be, but inside I don't feel like it's being presented the way I truly want.

Also, people say that one of the benefits I'll be missing out on is being featured in the global tag pages. Well, I've gotten a whopping 5 hits from those pages since I started the blog in October. 98% of my followers are a result of me reading and commenting on their blogs and developing organic relationships - something that isn't going to change once I self host.

I'm not going into this expecting to become a zillionaire overnight. I will tell you that I am highly jaded with my current line of work and find great comfort and peace writing my blog and would love to be able to eventually make it my career.

I'm only putting forth minimal costs to get the move done which isn't going to bust my bank account. So, we'll see. Hopefully people will continue to follow my blog and I can give people a few minutes of laughter whether here or there.

I think what people are trying to warn you of is don't go too deep too fast. A lot of people get blog fatigue after a few months or they just get discouraged when they don't see the results they want after years of work, so be careful with what you invest until you see where it takes you. It doesn't hurt to try and if you have the time and money to invest in it now, more power to you, just make sure you manage your expectations.

I'll be really interested to see how your blog develops down the road though, good luck!

Good luck with your install. :)

But beyond that I really want an awesome design. Maybe that stems from early career as a web developer but most of the themes on free WordPress feel amateurish to me.

As I've said, if it ends up being too cost prohibitive, I'll probably just come back to free WordPress.

For me, wordpress.com has been fantastic.Three reasons:
1. I have a business to run outside of a blog. I don’t have the time nor inclination to self host.
2. Blog ads bug me. It may be just me, but I hate having a sign that shouts Buy Something on a blog I follow. I think blogging as a marketing strategy is brilliant, but the blatant selling through ads and Amazon pages...eh, not so much.
3. I can’t figure out how to make the profit math work for self hosting. Despite the “get rich” stories about blogging, I’ve seen surveys on for profit blogs that report majority of bloggers for profit make less than $20.00 a month. Sure, a few make a lot more, but that’s a few. So, I’m not sure why I’d take on the expense for hosting, the word press charges for shifting, etc., etc. for a couple of bucks a month.But, maybe you’ll be the blogging superstar that doesn’t have to worry about it.

Good luck!

But, I started this particular blog with a bigger picture in mind. Ideally, down the road I'd like to generate a decent amount of revenue from it. Whether that happens or not, who knows. But what I do know is that I have no chance of doing that here.

And if it doesn't work out, I'll be back here having learned some valuable lessons. But I have to at least try to make it work.

And besides, I will still be around here viewing and commenting on others blogs like before.

I have blogs hosted here and blogs hosted elsewhere, and I prefer here because I'm lazy and it has better SEO. I'm not a tinkerer. I like to write and post stuff, not fart around with themes, and I don't like to do updates and check for compatability and I have managed, a couple of times, to take a client's website entirely offline just because of plugins. In my opinion, unless you need flash constantly, or some other form of embed we can't have here, or javascript widgets, or paid advertising, it ain't worth the bother of going self-hosted except as a learning experience.

For example, I have my own domain now, but I didn't in the beginning. So links I put in articles still have .wordpress in the URL. If I moved, wouldn't I have to find EVERY one of those and change them?

Just curious.

I keep hearing stuff like, you don't want to leave WP.com because then you'll just be an island on your own. Well, Hawaii is an island and I believe they attract a good share of visitors. I did a survey on my blog asking them if they'd resubscribe if I moved and so far everyone has said yes. Whether that's true or not I don't know. But I am excited about trying to grow the blog in ways I just can't do on WP.com.

Now I am not such a tech geek where I would go in and hack all the php code. I have a full time job too as well as a family and pretty much relegate blogging time to between 8pm and midnight. So I didnt want to have to spend a lot of time coding. But with the theme I picked out and several plugins installed, I've done virtually no coding.

If you would like to see what Ive done so far, you can check it out at http://mainlandblogtest.com. My current blog as it http://themainland.net. So you can see the difference. Keep in mind, i am in no way ready to switch over yet as I have more config to do. I just want to illustrate that it can be pretty easy to get up and running on self hosted fairly quickly.