Moving to .com site?

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  fitnessluva · Member · Sep 21, 2009 at 2:41 pm

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  What are the benefits of moving to a self hosted site?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  thesacredpath · Member · Sep 21, 2009 at 4:46 pm

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  This is .COM, so I’m assuming you actually meant going self-hosted with the wordpress.ORG software.

  Benefits:

  You can do anything you wish within the terms of service at the web host including advertising (don’t quite your day job as most bloggers with advertising barely cover the costs of hosting).

  You have virtually thousands of themes to choose from, but you need to be careful since there are a growing number of themes out there with malware and virus’s embedded in them that can cause you issues.

  You can use plugins and modify the theme files free of charge including, if you know what you are doing, the underlying theme files and wordpress files. Again you have to be careful though as there are some very badly written plugins out there (some intentionally) and they can introduce security holes.

  Drawbacks:

  You can do anything you wish within the terms of service at the web host including destroying your blog by adding bad script to it, or failing to do regular backups and then when something goes wrong you lose a bunch of work.

  You are responsible for the installation, setup and configuration, and this typically includes creating some server-side files so that everything works properly (.htaccess and php.ini).

  You are responsible for all updates and maintenance including backups. You are responsible for all troubleshooting. If something goes wrong, you have to fix it, and sometimes that might mean diving into php script files or in some cases actually diving into the MySQL database to manually find/fix/remove what is causing the problem.

  Security on your site is your responsibility, and since you are on a server with others in most cases, you need to be very vigilant and make sure your site does not get infected by malware or virus’s and such. If your site gets infected and happens to infect others on the same server, it can get ugly quickly and I’ve heard of users being billed for fixing the damages.

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  fitnessluva · Member · Sep 22, 2009 at 1:07 pm

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  Thanks for the reply! That is what I meant. I am clueless here!