Posted by DevilPigeon
(here)
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It sounds like your blog was hosted by wordpress themselves, as you mentioned 'Wordpress TOS' (ie you signed up with wordpress.
com), but if you can afford it you'd be better off hosting your blog yourself using a shared hosting account. This way, you have total control on content, and aren't breaking anyone's TOS (other than maybe the hosting company, but I'd doubt it).
You'd need a basic understanding of FTP as well as the back-end of Wordpress and how themes are modified/which additional plug-ins to use etc (some PHP would definitely be useful, but usually only necessary for fine-grained tweaking). Cost-wise, I can only speak of prices in the UK (which tend to be higher than the equivalent in the US), but on average around £50/year plus any domains you wish to purchase. I've been with Dreamhost in the past, they're very good, give you loads of extras in your hosting package, the only downside for me was they use their own control panel (cPanel is the industry standard, and very easy to use).
If you go the self-hosted route, most hosts have Wordpress as a '1-click install' in their control panel, otherwise you can download the latest version of Wordpress (currently 3.5) from wordpress.
org
Some tips to make a self-hosted Wordpress blog more secure:
- Don't use 'wp_' as the table prefix when installing
- Don't use 'Admin' as the admin
- Use an obscure admin password (but store it physically somewhere safe!)
- Don't use the admin account for general purpose stuff (ie writing posts)
- Have a separate user account for writing posts
- .htaccess protect the 'wordpress/wp-admin' folder
Backups etc are still important