On the dangers of blog hosting services...
Emily Robbins over at How to Blog has had a frustrating experience with TypePad:
I have been having some seriously frustrating conversations with the tech support people over at Six Apart. I’m hoping that they will eventually do right by me, but as it stands right now I’m ready to pull my hair out.
TypePad currently does not support 301 permanent redirects, or any modifications at all to the .htaccess file.
This prevents visitors who have bookmarked your site from knowing that it has been moved to a new location, unless you manually update each and every post to provide the link for the current URL (which is what I have been doing).
As she states, you really should try and get your own domain name before you start blogging. Furthermore, it goes to prove how lesser companies use FUD to keep you planted instead of constantly innovating and providing more exciting features and services.
I found her blog as I searched for good comparisons between Movable Type and Wordpress. There are a bunch of very dated comparisons out there but nothing that is proving very useful to me. I’m a fairly experienced Movable Type user but I’m considering Wordpress for a new blog I’m starting mainly because my web hosting company can install and update it by default.
The major value-add for this support is the ability to respond to security threats. As Emily mentioned in her post, a recent threat was found in Wordpress 2.0.1 resulting in 2.0.2. My webhost already has a simple link allowing me to update the blog. If the feature-sets were comparable, that single advantage would push me over the edge.
I’ve collected a lot of useful comparison info so I might go and write up my own shootout.