After many doubts, considerations and evaluation of pros and cons I think I have made up my mind. I’m migrating to a self-hosted platform, at some moment this week.
Before giving you, in a following post and hopefully after the transition has been carried out smoothly, some indications in case you want to do the same, I will say that one of the reasons (there are many) that led me to this choice is what happened to Tammy and her blog a few months ago. I invite you to visit her site and read her story, because it’s very telling about how things often are in the internet age. To keep it short, she has hosted a couple of blog tours in the same week and that has made her blacklisted with WordPress. Worse, she has been denied access to her own blog, with the following notice (I quote from her blog):
Your site has been suspended from WordPress.com for violating the Terms of Service. If you believe your site was suspended in error, please contact us as soon as possible and we will review your suspension. (To learn more about what is and is not allowed, please see section 2 of our terms and our types of blogs page.)
Now, I don’t discuss the fact all bloggers that reside on WordPress.com abide by a set of rules they accept the moment they open the blog – one being NOT to engage in promotional activities. (It doesn’t matter if you buy, like I did, your own domain name. This still applies). Blog tours, considered as such, are therefore forbidden to WordPress.com users (yes, you read it correctly: forbidden. Prohibido. Verboten. だめ).
Now, you would expect rules to be applied with some intelligence. Anybody that follows Tammy knows she has not violated the spirit of the rule, no matter what the format might suggest. She writes thoughtful, informative and honest reviews, and the fact that they happened to be in a blog tour doesn’t mean they are biased. Or, if they are, they are in the sense that anybody who writes reviews is, in principle. What has followed was even worse though. She was not given the possibility to explain herself and prove her case, and she has been obliged to move in hurry to a self-hosted blog, and even pay WordPress to facilitate an already painful transition.
As I said, this was only one of the facts hat made me think seriously about the necessity of migrating my blog, but for sure it has been one of the most important. It doesn’t matter where the right and wrong stand here, the lack of autonomy and the censor-like attitude, justified or not, seem to me something relevant enough to act. And if for doing this I have to pay a few dollars per month and spend considerable time to learn new software (selfhosting is complicated, and not for the money: it’s the rest), well, so be it. Nobody ever said freedom is an easy choice.
To be continued.
Awww thanks for your support Stephen! I think you’re making the right choice. And you won’t have to learn new software as long as you’re going with WordPress.org (which is a completely different animal than WordPress.com). The WP.org dashboard is exactly the same and will only have new things that you can’t use on WP.com like plugins. Really there wasn’t any learning curve at all, I just got to do more cool things like use widgets with javascript and Rafflecopters!! Good luck and let me know if you have any questions:-D
Hello Tammy, many thanks – I am going to transfer in the next 48 hours, hopefully everything will go smoothly…! See you soon 🙂