Over the break we moved Sazbean.com and some of our other blogs over to WordPress.com from self-hosting WordPress on our own server.  Most of the process was relatively easy and overall we’re pleased with the results.  We made the decision to move for a few reasons: saving time and effort from updates and support, saving hosting costs (much cheaper), and additional syndication across WordPress’ network.

If you’re thinking of moving to WordPress.com or using them as your blogging platform, here’s what you should consider:

Advantages

• WordPress.com takes care of all the updates and support
• Cheap – you can have a blog hosted for free, but their low cost upgrades for control over CSS and domain name are worth it
• Additional syndication of your content throughout the WordPress network – we’ve already seen a jump in traffic from this effect
• Good selection of widgets to add functionality to your site – no need to worry about getting them working properly
• Integrated dashboard – makes it easy to work with multiple blogs and the interface is very easy to use

Disadvantages

• Limited control over the design and functionality of your blog (you have full CSS control with a paid upgrade)
• No javascript allowed – which limits your ability to use custom widgets and other services that require a script tag
• No outside site analytics – WordPress.com provides integrated statistics, but you won’t be able to use any outside analytics services since you cannot add any script tags to your blog
• Limited control over your domain name – unless you have control over your name server, you have to point your blog domain to wordpress.com so you’ll lose the ability to add any subdomains.  They have allowed some ability to host your own email or use Gmail. Hosting multiple blogs from the same domain is also limited.
• Limited control over files you can add to your blog (only images unless you purchase an upgrade – and then only movie files) – not too much of a problem with the various types of web services available to link to

Summary

After we moved to WordPress.com there have been some things that we could no longer do on our blog (in design and some in functionality).  But, overall, the tradeoff in terms of cost and time savings as well as additional exposure has already been worth it.  We’ll update you on our thoughts again after we’ve been here for awhile.

We want to hear from you – Do you use WordPress.com?  What are your thoughts?  If you have a self-hosted blog, why did you make that decision?