The blog has been taking off far more than I realized when I fist began, and I’m at the point I need to make a few decisions. Even though I blogged semi-anonymously at first, now I can’t even force myself to pretend that is the case. I’m beginning to think about switching to WordPress.org (the more advanced version of WordPress) or Typepad, but I’m concerned about the costs of using a webhost service. We’ll see what happens. Advice from you more experienced bloggers would be welcome!
For now, I’ve decided I’m just going to play with the template and see if that satisfies my need for change! haha Let me know what you think!
mattjudkins.com 
i have been on typepad since i started (though i did actually start a blogger blog for a few initial posts). the money has not been a problem justifying as all the little odds and ends are good quality and they have upgraded periodically. never had a space issue, only had two downtimes in my 3 years of doing this stuff. i’d say it is worth it. one might want to do their own hosting service as simple sites can be put together on hosting that is around $7 a month. you can plug in wordpress or other blog tools, plus a host of other applications.
Thanks Gavin – I appreciate you sharing your experience.
I just moved to a new host for my wordpress blog and have been very happy. The cost (with one free month for wordpress bloggers) is less than 7 dollars a month, and you can do so much more with a hosted blog than you can with a wordpress.com one. I recommend making the switch. But whatever you do, always keep your old blog up. It will continue to get hits long after you have stopped updating it, and you can drive readers to your new blog with several well placed notices in the sidebars, or even in the subtitle of your blog.