Self-Hosted WordPress Advantage: Part I

This evening as I left work I flipped the switch on my Domain Name Server to direct the SMUG domain to this self-hosted WordPress installation. Within about an hour it seems the traffic was being directed appropriately, as you see in the comments on the post below.

I had several reasons for making the change, and in addition to doing 300-level courses in the Blogging curriculum based on my experience in migrating to self-hosted WordPress, I’m going to plan to highlight some of those advantages I was pursuing.

One downside of WordPress.com is that it strips out all javascript, so I was limited in the kinds of widgets I could embed in the sidebar or within posts. So while I could include a single YouTube video (as in this Twitter 103 course), I couldn’t embed a playlist like the one below, which features several videos of Mayo Clinic patients and their families sharing their stories:

There’s no way to do that with WordPress.com! Pretty cool, huh?

Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

4 thoughts on “Self-Hosted WordPress Advantage: Part I”

  1. Lee – great to see that you went this direction. We (Community Health Network) recently started setting up a wordpress.com blog – but ran into the same issue, and moved to a self-hosted version. Glad to get some affirmation.

  2. Not being ablet to put the widgets you want in WP.com is definitly a huge drawback. As you can see, I use this platform myself, and it has many advantages. However, because of the lack of control I have to create my blog the way I want to, I am considering switching to the self-hosted options.

    1. Thanks for your comment, Scott. I’m going to be doing a series of posts soon about how I did the migration, step by step…and also a series on the advantages of self-hosted. WordPress.com is a great way to start, mainly because it eliminates the barriers and hassle factor (and expense.) But long-term you’re going to want to be on your own. One thing you might consider is domain mapping your blog from datexmedia.wordpress.com to blog.datexmedia.com right away (see Blogging 305: Domain Mapping) so you don’t have wordpress.com in the URL. Then when you migrate the links won’t break. I would suggest doing that ASAP, and then after I’ve published the series on migration of the blog to self-hosted, you should be able to do it within a few days.

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