Reasons To Host Your Own Blog, Slacker
June 3rd, 2010 Ryan Jones
Sure, you’re a busy professional, I understand that. You’ve got lots to say but very little time to actually say it. When you’re struggling to find time to blog, you can’t worry about actually maintaining that blog. WordPress.com, Blogger, Blogspot, and 27 other solutions all seem simple and easy to use, and most likely work great. You don’t have to worry about installing wordpress updates, paying hosting bills, or remembering to renew a domain name, all you have to do is concentrate on writing quality posts.
Except for one problem – you’re losing out on readers, revenue, and traffic!
Just as there are tons of upsides to using a hosted blog platform, there’s tons of downsides too. Here’s 3 quick reasons why you should actually host your own blog on your own domain.
- Control. When you host your own blog you’re in control of everything. You can change the layout, the plugins, the content, the domain, and well, everything. Sure it means managing your own backups, but it also means that your data remains intact. As we’ve seen with URL shorteners and recently with Geocities, there’s no guarantee your data will be alive forever. You also give up control of what that site should decide to do with your data if they pull a facebook style privacy fiasco in the future. By hosting your own, you at least control for how long it stays online.
- IT Departments Won’t Block You. Yes, the reason I’m writing this post has something to do with disgruntlement toward my company IT department. Most filtering systems today block places like WP.com, Blogspot, etc out of the box. That means if you’re writing about business stuff, many business people can’t read your blog. Think it’s a small amount of people? Think again! I myself work in the office of one of the largest companies in the world and I can’t read techcrunch because they host their stylesheet on WP.com, and that’s blocked.
- It Improves Quality. As somebody who was blogging before blog was a word, I often pine for the pre-wordpress days when the only people with blogs were those who know a bit of perl. I’m trying not to sound nostalgic, but there’s something about enduring the hard work of creating a site that makes you strive for high quality content. If you’re paying for the site, there’s that extra bit of incentive to try to make it worth your money. I’m willing to wager that so many blogspot blogs go by the wayside due to lack of personal investment in the blog by the writer.
If you’re going to blog, don’t be a slacker and do it right from the start. Grab yourself a domain name and some hosting, install your platform of choice on it, and start cranking out the quality content. It will not only make you a better writer, but doing things yourself will make you a more experienced IT professional – especially when it comes to familiarity with things like SEO, Programming, Hosting, etc.
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