It wasn’t too long ago that I moved to WordPress.org after an almost three-year absence, and then quickly moved back to WordPress.com. I had a lot going on and just wasn’t ready to take the plunge. Now, I am ready to take the plunge, and here I am, again.

I could re-hash all of the reason for why I want to be self-hosted on WordPress.org vs. staying on WordPress.com, but you should really just read the original post linked to above. Nothing has really changed except for the plugins used and how I’m hosted.

Rather than being hosted on DreamHost’s standard shared hosting service, I’m now on DreamPress, their managed WordPress hosting service. Think of it as a special server which only hosts WordPress and is therefore designed to serve every aspect of it as quickly and perfectly as possible. That is a severely watered down explanation of it, but I figured you could get all of the juicy details from the link. 🙂

Plugin-wise, I’m starting out with Jetpack for tons of features, Akismet for anti-spam, VaultPress for backups, Google XML Sitemaps for sitemaps, and a few different plugins for security which I won’t be disclosing this time around. 😉

Big thanks to Mike Schroder and Mika Epstein for both occasionally encouraging me to go back to being self-hosted and for essentially creating DreamPress, Zandy Ring for making sure that everything was moved properly, and Kathryn Presner, Caroline Moore, Lance Willett, and Ian Stewart for being totally cool with me occasionally ambushing them with theme questions.

Here’s to many more years self-hosted on WordPress.org, filled with the usual combination of fun, mistakes, and self-education.