3 reasons to self-host a WordPress blog

I am planning to migrate my two year old blog on WordPress.com to a self-hosted version (WordPress.com).  The advantages of self-hosting are three

• I can choose any theme I like
• I can link up to Google Analytics that will tell me lot more about my traffic
• I can add advertisements

Online strategy

I prepared for the big migration by thinking about my online strategy.  Despite wanting to put some adverts on it, my blog is not part of my commercial strategy.  I use it think things out and to write regularly.  It is a notepad where I develop, rather than sell ideas.

Ideally, I want it to link to my “CV” sites and to use its page rank to boost other online ventures.

Online organization

As I dallied, a tai chi outfit in the states snapped up flowingmotion. com.  My names is rather common as well.  So I settled on this strategy.

• Buy a domain in my name (jojordan.org)
• Take up jojordanorg on Facebook
• Set up an central organizing point on a free Posterous blog and redirect it to jojordan.org
• Make my blog a sub-domain of jojordan.org (flowingmotion.jojordan.org).

The reason I did this is because Posterous makes a good-looking front end CV site where I can link out to all my CV assets – Linkedin, Xing, Slideshare, etc.  It’s easy to redirect the Posterous blog to my domain jojordan.org which is hosted by Dreamhost.

I thought for a moment that I could host the blog at jojordan.org/flowingmotion and take full advantage of its page rank; but it seems not.  So a sub-domain it is:  http://flowingmotion.wordpress.com.

Costs and maintenance

In summary,

• I’ve purchased a domain name http://jojordan.org.  I bought it through Dreamhost and will need to pay for an annual renewal.  At the time of the renewal, I could move it to another host/registrant like GoDaddy, if I want to.
• I set up a “permanent” CV front end with Posterous.  That blog stays with them for free and I redirect it to the domain at Dreamhost.  This seems counter-intuitive because it is working the other way. People go to http://jojordan.org and they are redirected to Posterous.
• I am now taking my blog hosted for free at WordPress.com and I am moving to Dreamhost.  I will pay them a monthly fee for hosting my blog on their computers but the software will come for free from WordPress.org.  I will use a free theme which I have edited to suit me.

Clear so far?  I need to add the instructions for redirecting the Posterous blog to Dreamhost because that tripped me up the first time I did it.

Now I am going to set up the “full hosting” for the WordPress blog.