WordPress as a CMS – limitations ?

Hi,

I am going to build a personal site with some fairly static information about myself and my life situation. I also plan to incorporate a blog which will be updated frequently. I have never before used WordPress or any other CMS for that matter.

I thought about building the site as I have always built sites, XHTML and CSS, with navigation menu and sub-pages and all that. But then when I was researching how to integrate a blog into the site, and I started looking into WordPress, I realized that WordPress seems to be more than a blog application and also a fully fledged CMS. And the thought started brewing: “Maybe I should build the whole site in WordPress, since the core of the site will be the blogging activity?”

The catch is, I want this site to be a longlived one and I want to prepare it for many comments from other users and lots of blogging entries every week. I expect it will be a site with frequent updates both from me and also comments by visitors.

So the question I am asking myself is: Does anything in the way WordPress works, mitigate against using it for the whole site? E.g., if a lot of content is added (some sub-pages, but mainly blogging and comments), will the whole site become heavier and slower or something. I mean since it is contained in a mysql-database, if the database grows large maybe it becomes unresponsive like a heavily fragmented harddrive full of small files.

What if it becomes a popular blog (there is a possibility for that, said in all humility). Can the site just keep on growing and still function? At what point do I need to buy more PHP-memory allocation and larger database sizes from my web hoster in order to ensure that the site continues to function?

I am sorry if these are somewhat fluffy questions, but I just want to know if WordPress is right for me.

Thanks a lot!