I Have A Decision To Make

I have been with Blogger for all six and a half years I've been blogging. I've seen them grow and change and add features and continue to become better. Before Blogger had commenting capabilities, I signed up with Haloscan. When Blogger added commenting abilities, I stayed with Haloscan because I didn't want to hassle with trying to convert my comments. This is the same reason I stayed with Blogger when I toyed with the idea of hosting my blog myself.

I learned today that Haloscan is shutting down. I have no choice but to try to convert or disconnect all of my comments. Haloscan has graciously provided an export mechanism but they know of no import mechanism for any of the popular blogging platforms. I'm sure if I spend some time with Google, someone has information on how to get my Haloscan comments into Blogger - or they'll eventually surface.

So now I have a decision. Do I stay with Blogger or do I move to another platform such as WordPress? Do I go with a hosted solution or do I host it myself? Blogger has a lot of easy to use features that they didn't have six years ago. Template and layout changes are simple and easy. Photo uploads are a no-brainer.

The advantage of hosting it myself is it is whatever I want it to be, wherever I want it to be. The disadvantage is I have to keep paying for it to keep it going. I also have to manage my own plugins and deal with spam comments (something I'm getting a lot of on some other WP blogs I have).

What do you think? Is it time to move on?