Why I came back to wordpress.com hosting

Yea! Just as I moved to host to my blog myself with wordpress.org with a bang, I came back within 35 days like a ball bouncing back from the wall!

I changed my themes crazily, tried new colors and widgets and backgrounds and headers and stuff and then when I felt that it wasn’t enough, I went one step ahead by moving to wordpress.org! My mind’s love for trying new things made me spend around 10000 bucks in a matter of few minutes to start my self hosting with a bang!

Moving back and forth between WP.com and WP.org!

Crazy me! I purchased web-hosting account with hostgator and started hosting my blog with wordpress.org. The new domain name and trying out new themes kept me busy and happy for a while without much thinking!

But then as days passed by (well within around 35 days!), I realized all was just a waste! Its not the first time that I feel that I have wasted money! It happens! Often for me! 😉

Writing or marketing? Losing focus!
Basically, I started blogging as a pleasure and fun activity for me to relax! My blog is the place where I let my creativity loose without any hindrance. Its just for my joy of writing something! But then, as soon as I ‘invested’ around 3,000 bucks per month for hosting my blog, my mind started reeling about how to attract more visitors, how to improving page ranking and so on! That was not why I started a blog! I don’t want to do any business out of this! (Atleast not now!!).

The whole aim of starting this blog was at stake since I moved to self hosting! This is what happens when we just follow our mind where ever it takes us! We lose focus of what we want in our life and the main aim/goal we had in the first place! Just following our mind’s ramblings doesn’t do any good! It just keeps saying so many things! It is not wise to follow whatever it says! Gotta develop skill to differentiate minds ramblings out of craziness and real intuitive feelings! Its high-time that I start spending more time in calming my mind… Hmm….

No publicize plugin in wordpress.org!! 😦
Coming back to the story, its not only that I started losing focus but also, wordpress.com hosting is more convenient when all you want to do is just write! WordPress.com gives so many features these days that you can host a really good blog without any overhead of maintaining a site!  It has this super cool publicizing feature with which I can easily control publishing of my posts to facebook or twitter! Beware! This feature is not yet available as plugin in wordpress.org at all (Don’t believe me? check this out here!!) That was really depressing for me!

WordPress.com announces its premium themes!
And there are tens and hundreds of beautiful free themes here with wordpress.com as well. More than that, wordpress.com also announced premium themes after I moved to wordpress.org!! That was really shocking for me! If at all I want better looking themes, I can always go for it in wordpress.com itself!!Though I don’t like the collection of premium themes right now, I am sure there will be more interesting themes very soon.

Email subscription and my subscribers!
And there was this email subscription widget in wordpress.com by default which helped my readers to subscribe to my posts via email. Though I don’t have huge number of subscribers that I can boast about, I do have few handful of people who really wanted to read my posts! And I was missing them because, I can’t move my subscribers from this blog to the self-hosted blog! I will be losing my subscribers or I have to ask them to subscribe again which I didn’t want to do! I can install a new plugin for this email subscription but it did not offer to show me my subscribers like I see them in wordpress.com!

Losing my Blog hits!!
I have got more than 20,000 hits in these 2 years of blogging! Now when I move to the new blog, I can divert (and I did) all the old visitors to the new blog. But I can’t move the actual blog hit stats to the new blog! So, its like building that blog-trust all over again. I can of course do that especially when given the fact that the self hosted blog attracted more visitors than this wordpress.com blog on an average per day. But it doesn’t matter to me anymore! The increased visitor count does give me pleasure but that is not for what I started this blog!

Sharing, Gravatar, widgets, site-stats and more!
And not to forget the sharing buttons as well! Gravatar, widgets, site stats – all these are inbuilt in wordpress.com whereas you have to search, download and install these as plugins in self-hosting wordpress.org!

Freshly Pressed blogging community!
And, I realized that I was also missing the “Freshly Pressed” posts being displayed when I log in, in the self-hosted blog. I used to get more inspired by seeing these freshly pressed blog post and I wasn’t seeing them anymore in the wordpress.org blog. I felt completely disconnected and also confused with so many widgets and plugins that I gotta manage myself now! Phew!

When all I want to do is just writing…
Well.. I could have troubleshooted and spent more time in jiggling around all these crazy plugins and widgets in wordpress.org to get what I want! But I really did not want to waste all my time in doing these especially when I know that I have all of them ready-made in wordpress.com for free!! All I wanted to do was writing! Write some nice stuff popping up in my mind for my pleasure and satisfaction! And, I did realize that I can happily do that with the current free blog hosted by wordpress.com! Why lose focus then?

Custom built house Vs Ready-made flat/apartment
Self-hosted blog with WordPress.org is like building your house from the scratch on your own! You get the freedom to choose where you want to keep that window, where you want this shelf and how many rows should the shelf have and how that door should be designed and so on and on and on. It might give real pleasure doing all these for those who really want control at such level and also have the patience to do all those customizations! But for a person like me who always likes only ready-made flats which is ready to live in, doing all these customization was just a pain-in-my-ass!! And, trust me! This ready-to-use flat (wordpress.com) offers much more facilities than you can imagine!

Its not just with building.. Maintenance matters!
It doesn’t stop with just building the individual custom house. You gotta take care of maintenance as well! Just like how you become responsible for maintaining your own custom house, the self-hosted blog also demands the same! You have to take care of the back-ups, spam control and what not! If its a flat/apartment, you can always trust your association guys to do the maintenance and care less about it! And, wordpress.com cares enough for me about all these! I should have realized this before purchasing the hosting account! But then, my mind wouldn’t stop until it wastes few bucks and experiences everything itself!

The good thing is that I realized this at-least within the 45 days money back guarantee! So, I didn’t lose much (I did lose the money in purchasing the domain name though!) in this another exciting learning experience! Back to happy ‘writing’ now!!! 😉

Tags: Blog, Gravatar, No publicize in wordpress.org, self hosted blog vs wordpress.com blog, should you go to wordpress.org, think before going to wordpress.org, Web hosting service, why I came back to wordpress.com, wordpress, wordpress.com, wordpress.com has premium themes, wordpress.com vs wordpress.org