The last couple of weeks, I’ve been dealing with some malware on my personal website and a couple of other sites I manage. After spending a Saturday and several evenings cleaning it up, I decided to move my personal website from my self-hosted WordPress set-up — which I’d been running quite happily for many years — to a hosted solution. Merlin Mann’s endorsements for Squarespace on his Back to Work podcast have convinced that, at this point in my life, I care more about creating content than administering code.

After comparing Squarespace, tumblr, and WordPress.com, I decided to move to WordPress.com, for the following couple of reasons:

• It’s low cost. (At this point, I’m paying only $12/year to map mikehickerson.com to my WordPress.com site.)
• Migrating from WordPress.org to WordPress.com was very simple.
• Unlike tumblr (which I like a lot for sharing links, photos, videos, etc.), I can create and manage a full website, with pages, subpages, menus, etc.
• A big plus: I could take my existing site design (which is based on WordPress’s default Twenty Eleven theme) and more-or-less transfer it to WordPress.com. Since I tend to obsess over design decisions, it was important that I could do something quickly with having to make new choices.

I’m not exactly sure how my permalinks linked from Facebook or other sites will transfer, but that’s a kink I can work out later.