I really, really like WordPress.com's approach to blogging: the usability, web standards, the simplicty and elegance of lots of templates. The things that make it stand out from Blogger, like categories and the ability to make some posts private but the rest of the blog public. It's all awesome and lovely.
I am aware that I can use WordPress.org's tool plus a paid hosting service. However, I want to use a free blog service because I want to be able to write and post things then leave them without worrying about paying a host annually or monthly. I basically want the peace of mind of knowing that if 10 years from today something happens I stop paying for a hosting service, my blog won't simply be deleted and disappear, because it's hosted for free anyway.
And this is why I choose to work with WordPress.com's service. However, I've had some serious issues with browsing the website for templates, editing my posts, and opening the dashboard or the control panel. Sometimes those pages don't load up at all; sometimes they load with no styling whatsoever, just serif-font text all over the page, and perhaps not even fully loaded. This happened with 3 different browsers simultaneously: Firefox, Opera, and IE! It also happened while several other websites were working just fine, including other external blog-editing pages, so my only valid conclusion was that something was actually wrong with WordPress.com's editing pages themselves. Because, on the other hand, browsing the actual blogs for only viewing purposes seems to work fine more often than the dashboard or editing pages.
This really, really disappointed me, because aside from this worrying observation, I really love WordPress. Can someone please honestly tell me whether WordPress.com's specifically editing pages sometimes do have issues with browsing or server stress? And if yes, then would you have tips to not make such a problem, if it happens, affect my ability to at least compose posts? For example, can I somehow compose posts offline, then have them published once I am able to browse the dashboard again?
Many thanks.
