We recently moved our blog from WordPress.com to ZippyKid.  Although WordPress.com provides a great service at a very reasonable cost, it didn’t provide us with enough flexibility and peace-of-mind to meet our needs long term.  After several weeks of searching and research, we decided to give ZippyKid a try.  For $25/month for an individual site, they promise to keep your WordPress site up-to-date and your load times to a minimum.  They don’t have much of a knowledgebase and don’t have any real user forums so if run into any issues or need some guidance getting your site up and running, you’ll have to open a support ticket.  So far, they’ve been very quick to respond so I can’t really complain.  They do offer SFTP access and allow you to install our own plugins — neither of which WordPress.com allows — so we can already see some real benefits from making the move.  Here’s hoping this proves to be a long term solution.