After running my own blog for several years on a self-hosted Windows server, I finally decided to move my software engineering blog to wordpress.com. For both, security and maintenance reasons, I decided to use the WordPress service instead of running my own installation.

Over time, maintaining the WordPress installation just turned out as quite time consuming tasks. Frequent updates on WordPress itself, the plugins and themes, the hosting operating system, the Perl, PHP and .NET packages almost became a full time job.

At the time, I set up my own server, there were only little possibilities to host all the services I used on the Web (or let’s say meanwhile cloud). While I used to host my own Web Servers (IIS and Tomcat), SVN repository, SMTP server and various databases you can find most of these nowadays offered by third parties, most of the time for free. Most of these offers are sufficient for the experiments you perform to keep up to date with the technology or to experiment with new approaches.

As a fist step. I decided to purchase the domain mapping feature from wordpress.com to use my own subdomain http://www.hack-the-planet.net. Following the technical documentation and Matthias’ post, all you have to do is to set up a CNAME entry with your current registrar (if you just want to map a subdomain). As I use domainFactory as my registrar, this was pretty easy using their Web interface.

Moving to wordpress.com, I hope to free up more time for researching and blogging in the future again.