The current WordPress blog is “tomalanbrosz” already, hosted by WordPress.

There are other sites which invite you to publish, and will pay a pittance based upon enough readers.

The only real advantage to moving it to a hosted site would be not having the “wordpress” bit in the web address. Some people think this screams “amateur,” but since I’m not running a business or worried about looking “professional,” I’m not sure I care.

It sounds like generating an XML file now and then just for backup wouldn’t be a bad idea.

By “free hosted” you probably mean wordpress.com. I’m not sure if they’ve disabled that feature to, perhaps, extort money for export as a $ervice. If the feature is there, it’s in the Dashboard under the Tools menu. If not, you’ll have to contact them about it.

The XML file will take care of your data–posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags–but you’ll still need to transfer your attachment files. That’s just brute-force upload and download. Knowing how you manage your data, I’ll bet you don’t have anything on the current site you don’t also have on your home PC, so it’s just an upload per file. But here’s the heartbreaking part: All your image and etc. files will have new URLs based on the date of uploading to the new site, and references to them in your posts, with URLs from the old site, will be broken.

If you can get a list of the URLs to your attachment files on the current site, you could edit the XML file to search and replace the old URLs with new ones.

Or, if it’s just a few to fix, you could just do it post-by-post after importing.

Oh, but wait: Your current place is free, so why not just keep it to host your attachment files? The transferred posts will still be pointing back there, new posts will have new URLs…problem solved!

Unfortunately, the trick is picking out the two sliders you’re actually going to use.

Most hosting systems are capable of running a complete business sales website. I basically just want to show pictures and maybe a couple of links.

I’m leaning toward GoDaddy at this point, the “middle” solution, since I should be able to run two domain names at a time for one price.

It will be interesting to try and “import” my current free WordPress site to a hosted one without spilling any soup.