In these days we have lots of blog services to choose. We can see this post in problogger where can see the popularity of each system.
This image was taken from problogger
So as we can see the most popular platform is wordpress.org. For free solutions I think wordpress.com is the best. But the problem with free solutions are that you don’t own the content or the blog. The company who host it is the want that decides if they host or not your blog. You may think that you only want to keep a small blog to write some of your stuff. But what if your blog grows and grows. Then you are limited to that free blog. What if you write something a big company dislikes and they decide to sue wordpress.com? Wordpress.com will turn off your blog or erase that content. This has happened before (aka. blogger in china). So here is the list:
- You own your content.This may not be important to you right now. But may in the future. As companies get more and more picky with the information online and how it is used.They will used every posible method to protect their interests. By having a self hosted blog you control what you upload, erase, or modify. Its all up to you. Viva la libertad de expresion!!!
- Forget ads. Many free services put ads in your weblog to pay for the hosting and make profit. By having your self hosted blog you forget about these things. And of course you can have a more professional look and make more visitors come to your blog by eliminating ads. And if you decide to put ads money will be for you, not for your blog hosting.
- Grow as big as you want. If you have your own server you will not be limited by the company that is hosting so you wont be worried by bandwidth excess, unless you use a very limited hosting package, of course. What if you don’t have any more space? For example, wordpress.com only gives you 50mb of space. Which can run out quite quickly if you upload lots of pictures and files.
- Extensibility. When you have your own blog you can put as much stuff as you want. If you have wordpress you can install thousands of themes and plugins. You can host forums, chat systems, more blogs. Posibilities are virtually unlimited. You can add much more power to your blog. Therefore increasing its usability and of course its traffic.
- Your content, your ads, your money. What if your blog gets popular? Lets say a thousand visitors daily. With this amount of visitors you can get a couple dollars daily on adsense, if you get this amount of money daily during a year you get 700 dollars, not bad. With this amount of money you can pay a good hosting with domain 6 times. And all money you raise is for you not for your host. Even if you get half visitors daily you can pay your own hosting easily.
- Your own domain means more traffic. When your blog lives in a free blog hosting service you get normally a subdomain. The problem with subdomains is that they don’t rank as high in search engines as they do payed domains. These directly affects your traffic and therefore your earnings.
- Your own server for all your projects and stuff. When you have your own server a world of possibilities open. For example, in my server I have a community forum, a personal wiki to save all my codes and stuff, a testbed for my coding proyects, two blogs including this one, and several customers websites, and all backuped up info.
There are lots of advantages of having your own server. Even if it is shared hosting. You get the stuff you need. And it pays by itself if you invest some time to your blog. Also you can resell your hosting. If a friend ask you to host his blogs, accept, ask him/her for a small fee, lets say two bucks a month and allow him to have one wordpress installation so he can add all his pictures, plugins and themes he want. There are several ways to make your server pays by itself. So if your excuse is: “it is too expensive” is not an excuse anymore. If you think installing wordpress is too much for you, look for a hosting with fantastico support. You can install your Content Management system such as wordpress without hassle and not touching a line of code.
For my hosting needs I use and recommend bluehost. I once used 1and1 but their service was awful and the servers too slow. I will never buy them anything again, but decision is yours to make.
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