[greyman]

How serious are you about your intention? My suggestion is, that if you want to just try it out, register instantly on wordpress.com or blogger.com and try to run it for a few weeks. The thing is, that maintaining you own installation at your own domain takes quite a lot of time.

On the other hand, if you really want to run a successful blog, register your own domain and install...well, you will not go wrong with Wordpress.

[ionfish]

> [M]aintaining you own installation at your own domain takes quite a lot of time.

Not sure I agree with this, at least where WordPress is concerned. What, after all, is involved? Grabbing the source from the latest stable branch on the WP svn repository takes less than a minute. Creating a new database is a few seconds; adding the database details to the config file is less than a minute; and the install routine can also be run in under a minute. That's installation. Then there's maintenance: a cron job that updates the source from svn every night, and a one-line svn command to switch to a new branch when it comes out. A database backup script which, like the domain configuration, is not WordPress-specific.

Actually, having gone halfway through this response, I'm not sure I agree with my disagreement. Once you've sorted all of the above, you need to start doing things specific to your installation: choosing or creating a theme, installing plugins (preferably over svn from the WP plugin repository so you can update them automatically), and tweaking the various settings to your liking. But only the details are specific to WordPress, or Movable Type.

It would be more accurate to say that maintaining any reasonably complex website takes quite a lot of time. But then, we knew that already, and it still only takes five minutes to get WordPress installed on your server.

[42flicks]

I don't run my own installation (used the hosted one for about a year) but have seen friends upgrades go not so smoothly. In keeping with various updates I'd say it'd take a bit of time.

[ionfish]

The only time I've had problems upgrading was when, running off the trunk svn build, a new tags system which changed a bunch of database tables was introduced and then scrapped shortly afterwards. Repairing the tables was annoying, but that's life on trunk for you; there's a reason it's not recommended for production sites. Other than that, all of my upgrades have gone smoothly. In my (anecdotal) experience, most problems with upgrades (and, indeed, most problems generally) are caused by badly written or incompatible plugins.

[42flicks]

Yeah I do admit I should have included that this may have been caused by plugins.