I'd love to hear about self-hosted alternatives, especially ones where you can have a comments section. There are plugins in Wordpress that do comments (not brilliantly), but alternatives seem quite complex. It would be great to be able to interact with whoever reads your content..
You could consider reviewing how others do it. There's a reason why less and less want to host their comments and outsource that instead. Comment = write access to your site. You don't want that. There are multi-million dollar spam farms dedicating hundreds of developers to finding ways to spam and abuse comments.
Every single WP, Drupal and Joomla website that I know that was not properly maintained or hosted with a major provider (such as WP@WP themselves) got hacked at some point.
Right - but I really do want comments. This site and many many others have write access and manage. If a self-hosted solution ever caused me issues on account of spam etc, I'd review the situation.
With outsourcing comments someone else handles (some of) the back-end, facilitating appearance of comments on your site but limiting your own back-end exposure.
