Self-Hosting the Roxy's Best Of... WordPress MU Community

As my loyal Roxiticus Desperate Housewives and Bay Head Blog readers know, I've recently added the Roxy's Best Of... self-hosted WordPress MU Community to my daily blogging responsibilities. I'm really enjoying the freedom from Google/Blogger that a self-hosted blog allows, but the change has challenged me from a technology perspective. When I first started my Roxy's Best Of... blogging community, I wasted about a month trying to use the web hosting company that hosts our investment banking firm's web site. Turns out our business web host is not WordPress or blog friendly and wouldn't support the most up to date WordPress platform even after I uploaded the files myself using FTP. I've ended up with my blog designer and author of WordPress for Dummies Lisa Sabin-Wilson's hosting company, Blogs-About dot com, and Lisa and her husband have made self-hosting a breeze.

If you're thinking about making the switch to a self-hosted blog and need to find your own new web hosting service, I found a site that can save you a lot of time by comparing the strengths and weaknesses of various web hosts and providing an overall web host rating for each one. While WordPress capability was the most important for me, you'll also find ratings and awards for "Best Budget Hosting," "Best Blog Hosting," and "Best ECommerce Hosting," to name a few. WebHostRating.com also provides helpful articles related to self-hosting, including a tutorial on using CPanel, a web-based application that allows you to control every aspect of your website...but something I knew nothing about after three years on Blogger/Blogspot.

I'd be interested in hearing from other bloggers who have made the switch from Blogger/Blogspot to WordPress or other self-hosted blogs...am I the only one who needed personal training on WordPress for Dummies?