Introduction
This post is a non-biased post, created as a part of my research in an attempt to answer my own questions about should I go self-hosted or not. I am NOT an ExPERT and you must do your own research if you want to make money or run a business. This blog post is basic research. I will most likely stay a worpress.com user for some time, because at present I have no business ambitions.
Terminology
Below is my guess at these terminologies
What is a Web designer – A person who makes your website look lovely. Who should have the skill, to add in plugins and link to other websites, who can create themes etc. The person who design, who knows about colour, space and form. They may only know how to use wordpress.com. Potentially, the web designer may not be a coder.
What is a Web Developer – A web developer could also be a web designer, but I would say the web developer could be a lot more technical and really get down to some serious coding. They would create really technical solutions.
Web Designer Vs Web Developer – Actually, a person could do both depends on their experience. And it is all about the experience. So, if you chose to go self-hosted, and need help bare in mind experience of your web developer and designer. And bear in mind, they may only have experience in wordpress.org.
Why web designer /developers like wordpress.org – simply put, you can do more with it, it is not locked down like wordpress.com
Content Developer – Well you could say you are the content creator as you write the blog post.
What is Data Migration – If say you move from wordpress.com to wordpress.org – you want all your blog post and blog pages to move from .com to .org -right. So, that is what data migration is, it the shifting of data from one platform to another. Of Course, it isn’t as simple as I make it be in this paragraph. But, the point it is doable with WordPress. com happiness engineer and I guess the equivalent engineers at your new hosting company?
Free Domain vs Custom Domain and SEO. Basically, when I started out blogging in 2016 my site was free and was called http://www.thoughtsnlifeblog@wordpress.com or something like that. I decide to pay for my site so now it is http://www.thoughtsnlifeblog.com. I read or heard somewhere that Google or rather search engines don’t take domains that have @wordpresss.com or @wix.com, basically free sites as serious sites, so they won’t rank them in the first page of the search.
And of course here is video to explain the difference between a web designer or web developer.
Conclusion
Do your own research on this, this a basic post to help me figure it out. I am no expert and I don’t claim to be any clearer in what I should do.
Thanks for reading. This post was created 7th Oct 2018, it is not meant to be an expert advise post, it is a basic research post of someone who is still a bit clueless. But, the videos shared are helpful I know for sure.
If you have more experience than I please share it in the comments for other wordpress.com users to learn from. There are a lot of us that are confused.
Thoughtsnlifeblog 
Nice post
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Thank you
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