One of the toughest challenges in life is change. So when webmasters are confronted with having to “change” their hosting provider (for whatever reason), fear and uncertainty sets in. Thankfully, if you started your blog off at WordPress.com, a new option is available that will allow you to easily redirect your blog to your new hosting provider.
The way “offsite redirect” (which is what WordPress.com is calling this feature) works is simple. Instead of starting over on a clean slate (with a new domain name, etc), WordPress will offer users the option to redirect their example.wordpress.com blog to their new provider (example: mynewblog.com). This is beneficial for a myriad of reasons, perhaps the most important being to preserve SEO (search engine optimization). When visitors still visit your example.wordpress.com blog, they are automatically brought to mynewblog.com (this is an example).
Interested users can find this new feature in the ‘Upgrades’ menu, and it’s not free. The feature will cost you a very reasonable $12 per year.