If you want a VERY basic blog with LIMITED customization then getting the free site from wordpress.com might be fine. Unfortunately, I’ve had a lot of exposure to the full power of WordPress and using the ridiculously nerfed free version was just too frustrated for me…So, once again, I’m back to hosting WordPress myself. It was quite a process. I followed the Ubuntu instructions but I kept having permissions issues with my WordPress SQL account and it kept failing the installation. I tried these DigitalOcean instructions and WordPress installed successfully! 🙂 It was much more difficult than it really should be IMHO… That said, I’m happy to have full control over the blog again. I’ll have to be more diligent in my backups now…

I also setup Apache2 and have two different domains hosting on it. I’ll work on getting the HTTPS certs soon… I’ve spent enough time on this today. Gah…Not sure what I’ll do with the old wordpress.com blog site… Hmm.

UPDATE

Installed the HTTPS SSL Certificate – so you should be able to get a secure connection now.