I started the Frugal Nexus last June and I used wordpress.com.  I knew virtually nothing about blogging, hosting or WordPress.  WordPress stuck to my head, like a bur sticks to a pant leg,  WordPress.com had name appeal and after some reading I decided that it would work for me.  I worked my blog for almost a year, but I desired more.  WordPress.com puts advertisements on your site and given the content matter of my site, I found it unsettling.  I also found the stats on WordPress.com to be too simplistic.  WordPress.com only broke down visitors by country and pages viewed.   Anything more sophisticated required fancy accounts.  So I decided to switch.

1) switching was easy
Wordpress.com offers a service of $168 to transfer your account.  Maybe in the nebulous of bloggers, there are bloggers who know virtually nothing about tech, so such a service would be useful.  But for the average person, I have no idea why anyone would pay such a sum to transfer an account.  The only hiccup I experienced was that I’ve had to re-upload my featured images for articles to my new hosting.

2) Hosting companies
There are a myriad of web host companies. I’m reluctant to plug my host, due to the fact I shun advertisement.  However, I decided to use InMotion hosting.  The first year rate was better than Bluehost, Godaddy and a few others I looked at.  InMotion also had many featured that were useful, including the ability to host two websites on one account.  InMotion offers unlimited storage and unlimited email accounts.  I’ve had nothing but a good experience with InMotion, for now at least.

3) I’m glad I did it.
The plugins for self-hosted WordPress make managing a website pretty easy.  You have all sorts of options and there is nearly unlimited potential.  Not to mention my domain looks better without the .wordpress in the title.