Self-hosting your WordPress blogs gives you so many more options, but it lets you run into so many problems. I hope, there will be a long time with a minimal amount of trouble ahead.
Of course, self-hosting your blogs relieves you from the sorrow, that Google is going to suspend Blogger.com within just a couple of days. They don’t like it, it competes against Google+, they are definitely going to remove it at the latest in 2015, just to name a year.