Because my new department doesn't provide web hosting in the same way that my old department did (and does), I decide to make use of a hosting I bought last year. Back in 2011 Hostable.com offered three years of unlimited hosting for $0.99. I caved and signed up, but haven't used it yet.
Hostable.com uses cPanel, an apparently popular website manager. It seems simple enough to use, and installing WordPress.org (the open source platform for blogging that many sites including WordPress.com use) was a breeze. Importing and Exporting my WordPress.com site was also easy. I picked a new theme (Catch Box), and tweaked a few settings (display name, permanent links, etc.). Nothing fancy.
Some things I did change were making the Pages based on "Disable Sidebar Template" and instead of "Default Template" (using the Screen Options, Discussion Checkbox) disabling comments on the pages. Also, pages are ordered using numbers that are all defaulted to 0. Quick Edit from the All Pages... page is the way to go for this.
Oh, don't change the WordPress URL and Site URL options if you don't know what they do. I did, and broke the site. I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling, which went quickly. Also, make backups when things are working.
Moving on, I updated the DNS servers at GoDaddy.com (where I bought my domain name) to point to Hostable's (ns1.hostable.com, ns2.hostable.com) and used the "Add on domains" option in cPanel. Now, douglaswhitaker.com redirects here. Changing the WordPress Address (URL) option in the settings page to http://douglaswhitaker.com and... nope, that doesn't work yet. Apparently Site URL had to change, too. Either way, it's working now. So, yeah. New website. Updates coming soon. Maybe.