Should you host your blog yourself or pay someone to host it?
Are you looking for the best web hosting sites?
It doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie or a veteran this question always comes up when creating a new blog.
Usually someone new to blogging would gravitate to hosting a blog themselves or get a free blog and as time goes by with experience they begin to ponder maybe paid blog hosting isn’t so bad after all.
So what is better?
In my opinion paid hosting is best. I think the best web hosting sites is Bluehost.
To answer this question, let’s first look at how a blog is created.
Just like creating web pages, first, you need a software or script that will take your entries, format it and publish it to the web.
The second component of a blog, is the web space, where the software should publish to, a home for the blog pages.
Knowing this information, let’s review the different ways to host a blog:
Full blog host.
This is where the blogging system or software is provided for you and your blog is also published to a web space provided by the host. Blogger or SquareSpace fall into this category. It’s very much like creating a website with a site builder.
Hosted blog software but published elsewhere
This is where the blog software is provided for you but the blog pages are published to another website or web host altogether.
By doing this, the software acts as a publishing system like FrontPage except it creates nicely formatted blogs.
Blogger is probably the most well-known for this.
Yes Blogger can do both. Publish to their host or to yours.
Blog software and blog are hosted on your web server
This is where you would install the blog script (software) on your web server – it can be any web hosting account.
And when you publish, the blog itself resides on your web server also.
To draw a parallel, this technique is like buying web hosting and then installing a content management system on it to help you build web pages.
If you’re new to building web pages or have built sites using site builders then you might want to go with a fully hosted blog.
These hosts do all the nitty gritty for you and there’s very little technical stuff you need to know.
If you can point and click, you can build a blog with a full blog host.
Having said that, just because you’re seasoned at building web pages doesn’t mean full blog hosts won’t work for you.
In fact, if you have many blogs this becomes very appealing since you won’t have to worry about upgrading the blog script, people exploiting the script, making plug-ins work or what happens when your web host decides to disable part of your blog functions because there is a security hole.
All you do is concentrate on blogging. After a while, blogging becomes more important than maintaining your blog and that’s the way it should be.
Next up, hosted software but blog is published to your website.
This seems to be the best of both worlds.
At time of writing, WordPress free account is one of the best ways to do this but because of its popularity often and free, you find the system too slow to publish or completely down just when you have a hot idea to share.
The idea is good but you’ll also be depending on someone else’s availability to publish your blog.
It’s much like using a friend’s computer to build your web pages and you know how that can go.
Finally, you have the option to use scripts. This is also a very popular method.
The flexibility it allows is very liberating because you can mold the blog anyway you want.
You can even get a programmer to create custom plug-ins or customize the whole blogging system the way you want it.
In short, you can do pretty much anything you want.
The down side, you need at the very basic, some knowledge of HTML or publishing web pages.
Also the burden of upgrading, troubleshooting and maintaining the script is on you.
If you have one or two blogs it’s not so bad but once you start having more, it can be quite tedious.
You also have to consider all the other responsibilities of maintaining the script as mentioned earlier.
Armed with this information, you should be able to figure out which one is for you.
If you’re still undecided, think of how you would do it if you’re creating a regular website.
Chances are your choice method for publishing a website is also the best method for you to create a blog.
The best web hosting sites in my opinion is Bluehost it is cheap and reliable.
This article is about blogging and why you should never blog on a free host like blogger.com or wordpress.com I am writing this to alert people out there who are building blogs on free blog hosts like blogger.com and wordpress.com.
The best web hosting sites are the ones you pay for because you are free from being attacked.
My favorite web hosting site is Bluehost.
Installing wordpress.com is free and gives you full control over your blog. There are other platforms like moveable type to choose from as well.
Take a look around and find the platform you like or that best fits your blogging style. I’ve learned an expensive lesson and now will only build blogs on my own domain names.
The reason?
Let’s start with blogger.com
They have a new out of control spam bot. Search the blogger help forums and you will find the horror stories.
Legitimate blogs are being deleted, people are getting locked out of their blog until reviewed, and assumed to be a spammer because either the bot flagged the blog or someone clicked the little flag button at the top of all blogger blogs.
That and the fact that they have constant problems with the publishing getting stuck at 0%, slow load times, etc. it makes blogging through blogger.com a buggy experience at best and your content or reason for blogging is up to someone else’s interpretation of what is or is not legitimate.
I understand getting rid of spammers, but in blogger.com case the cure is worse than the disease.
They were not always that way. I’ve been on blogger a long time and the service used to be good.
As far as wordpress.com, they are just as bad. If the blog links to a website and looks as if it might be promoting people to go to that website they will suspend your account without warning and lock you out of all the content.
I’m not sure what they think blogs are for, but they seem to think they have a noble purpose in life and that they alone decide what is a “genuine blog” or not.
A “genuine blog” is one that is controlled by the individual who writes to it, not one that must adhere to someone else’s idea of what their blog should look like and what it should say.
If you blog on free hosts just be aware your content and your blog is in the hands of others who will decide for the world whether or not your blog should be seen by others.
I recommend all bloggers get their own domain names and install their own blogs. You probably have learned that using a free host for your company’s website is bad for business so why put your company’s blog on a free host?
The same goes for individuals.
Blogs allow you to express yourself the way you want to express yourself. That is the beauty of blogging.
Are you willing to sacrifice your individuality to conform to what blogger.com or wordpress.com thinks is a “genuine” way to express yourself?
Many times the person deciding your fate is someone who has never had any authority over other people and who think that now they have Godlike powers to decide the fate of content written by others.
These are people who likely produce no content of value themselves and think they know what is best for the rest of the world.
Get your own domain name and install a blogging platform that fits your needs. It’s the best advice you will ever get about blogging. The best web hosting sites is Bluehost.
You only own the blog if it is on your own domain name. Everything else is just providing content for someone else.