Jul 17
Start Blogging Series (Part 2) – Choosing Your Blogging Platform
Yesterday in the first part of my Start Blogging Series, we discussed the basics of blogging. Today, we’ll cover…
Part 2 – Choosing Your Blogging Platform
“To host, or not to host? That is the question.” For too many beginner bloggers this question is glossed over, or worst yet – not even considered at all.
The decision to host your own blog or going with a free online service can greatly impact your life as blogger. Unfortunately for some, that realization can take a while to set in…Resulting in a loss of traffic, revenue and sponsorship. Sometimes – That late realization can mean starting over completely.
“Wait, wait. What is hosting“?
Simply put, a host refers to the company that “houses” your website. In the old days, AOL, Geocities, Tripod and even Yahoo! used to host a lot of web pages. Nowadays, prices are low and consumers much more educated so these solutions often don’t make sense for tthis web savvy generation. But then why do people choose to pay for these services if they can get them free from the above companies? The answer : flexibility.
Free Hosting
If a company is hosting your website for free, you’ll be up and running in no time. There are many good sites up on the web including Typepad, Blogger and even Wordpress will allow you some free space for your blog! Just enter a username, a password, and for most free websites you can start blogging immediately without another thought to the setup process. That’s it! And by that’s it, I mean “that’s it”. Want to customize your comments area? Oo. You might be out of luck. Hey-how about adding some code to protect your site from SPAM? Oof. Might be dicey. And what if you want to change the basic functionality of your site? Argh! Don’t bother asking! Well if it’s this bad? Why would anyone do it? Well for a lot of people, free hosting makes sense. If you think you’re going to break your computer 9 out of 10 times you use it, free hosting might be for you. Additionally, if all you want to do is get your thoughts out in the world, you might want to give this solution some serious consideration.Paid Hosting
If you want to be able to do anything you want with your site, paid hosting is going to be the way you want to go. And with very affordable prices (often as low as $30ish), this is an option that most should at least consider. Not only can $30 grant you the ability to host your own website, it can also grant you the ability to host MANY sites on your web server. (BTW, a web server is essentially software on a computer that allows it to serve web and Internet data, including websites). I’m not going to lie though, the first time getting your hands on your own server can be very OVERWHELMING. Hopefully the company you’re with will help you through some of the parts that are new, but sometimes you gotta just get a good book, hit some web forums, and just grind through it. Now, I wish I could tell you that the setup ends there. Well, it doesn’t. At this point, you actually haven’t done any setup! Before we even talk about the blogging part you have to register a domain name, point it to your new server, and add the URL to the DNS. Yikes!, I know. But it can be done. And there are a lot of people, (myself included), who would love to help you with it.
So at this point you can upload files to your server and have them on the web as your website, (i.e. www.yoursite.com), but it’s still not in blog format. To accomplish this, you have to upload blog software on your site and install that through your web browser. The most popular of which is Wordpress (the software version, not the “online blog site version”) and if you get that going, you’re in the clear. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want it, PLUS you have access to thousands of plugins and themes that can take a lot of the stress off of you as a web developer. But just to be honest, your first time installing Wordpress can be painful. Will it be worth it? Absolutely.
Picking the Wrong Platform
I said earlier that choosing the wrong platform could be DISASTROUS for a blogger.
- Consider Case 1: You decided to take the plunge head first into blogging. You have your own server, are paying $30 a month for it and are ready to go. Unfortunately, you don’t have the time to learn some basic server administration, so not only do you not have your blog software up and running, but you’ve been burning $30 a month for the past 6 months leaving a sizeable whole in your wallet.
- Consider Case 2: You’re new to blogging and don’t want to invest a lot of your money or time so you decide to go with a free online service. After a couple months, you now realize that you’re addicting to blogging. Besides that, you’re not half bad at it and have amassed a tremendous online following saying that you could make some decent side money. Only problem is, to make the most out your monetization efforts you need your own site (www.yourname.com) and right now you’re site is (yourname.blogger.com). If you switch now, it’s going to take a while to get back where you are now. Plus, how are you going to move all those old posts over?
Conclusion
At the beginning it’s hard to figure out which way you should go. I wish it was easier, but it’s not. The only thing you can do is wait ’till the time is right and then switch – Work fast. Oh, and if you really want to host your own site, don’t let your fear stop you. As I said, there are so many resources and people who would love nothing more than to help you with your endeavor. If you want it to work, there are people who can help you make it happen.
Next Time: Getting Into a Blogging Routine
July 17th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
When I began the seocontest, I knew little to nothing. I had created a website for a flower store where I worked with success, but I had never had a blog and had never had a personal site. So I went with Tripod. Big mistake!!! And I also used Blogger platform. Next mistake. But that is all over now, and yes, I need to start ALL over again, but I have learned a lot from my mistakes and I am now very excited about all the new possibilities.
I highly recommend getting advice from someone who knows enough about blogging to really give you the ins and outs (or you could just read this great series you are writing!!!)
July 17th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
I think you should use Blogger if you’re just starting to blog. If the feed readers increase to… let’s say 30, then I think the Blogger platforms should go.
Oh yes– before I go, I want to tell you that I’ve stumbled your post.
July 17th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
@Danielle – So why was it a mistake to go with Tripod and Blogger? (And thanks for the love on this post, it was supposed to go out sooner, but I lost my net connection for the whole freakin’ day!!!!)
July 17th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Tripod is really no good for the following reasons – if you buy a domain name from them, you cannot transfer it – it is as though you rent the domain name. But either way no php, no asp, they don’t support .htaccess and so much more. You can never get Alexa ranking with Tripod, and if you decide to pay for hosting with the free subdomain to get rid of ads, you end up paying $5 a month which is a lot for hosting in my opinion. There is no DNS so if you decide to buy a domain name you have to mask the URL, which is not seo friendly.
Blogger is okay, but really Wordpress has so many options and extra stuff that you can do that Blogger kind of sucks. You can’t customize as much, you can’t add plugins the way you can with Wordpress, it does not do trackbacks like Wordpress, and it does not show you your new links in the dashboard. I could keep listing things that Wordpress has and that Blogger does not all night, but you get the idea.
Honestly, I would recommend to anyone: buy a domain name and use Wordpress. There are even some hosts that are free and will host your domain for free (but don’t use Freehostia because they have server problems). Awardspace is okay.
So that is what I have learned through trial and error…
July 18th, 2007 at 12:02 am
Good, sound advice for the beginning blogger. Good job!
July 18th, 2007 at 7:55 am
@Grace – I like the 30 feed reader landmark. Though even that may be too much. I’ve just made it to around 30 myself, and I feel like if I were JUST switching now, I’d be behind the ball. (And thanks for the stumble. (#):))
@Danielle – GREAT comment! You put a lot of good info in there that I’m sure is going to help a lot of people. I wanted to include that kind of thing in my post, but the more I thought about it, I wanted to stick to the more general ideas of Paid vs Free and not analyzing individual platforms. … I’m glad you picked up my slack! (#):D
@Carl – Thank you very much!
July 18th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
I’m liking the series great work. In regards to moving the old post most of the popular blogging software programs will let you do this without any problems.
When I was on Typepad I could transfer all my blog posts without any problems. A few of my friends used Blogger and finally made the move to a paid server they didn’t have any problems moving their blogs but they wished they had stared with WordPress from the beginning.
July 18th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
@Opal – Thanks for the insight budDY!
July 18th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Bush .. I got a little suggestion for you.
When this series is over, turn it into an ebook and offer it to your feed subscribers. The download link will only be available in your feed.
You can have a section in your sidebar that announces your free ebook to people who subscribe to your feed.
July 18th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
@Brown – How about that’s a GENIUS suggestion! Thanks Brown! Now admittedly, I have no idea how to do that at this point, but I imagine it can’t be all that hard right? Man oh man, I may have to owe you something for THIS gem if I can pull it off. I wonder where you picked up such a trick!
July 18th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
I think that’s a great idea from Baron. An e-book would be excellent and that’s a nice incentive to get people to subscribe to your feed.
Of course you’ll never truly be an a-lister unless you charge an insane amount of money for it like Christy and I are going to do with our e-books
July 18th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Go to your Feedburner account. Click on the “Optimize Tab”.
Select “Feedflare”. You’ll see a text field that says “Personal Feedflare”
Change the text and links in this code to suit your needs:
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/variableflareunits/GenericFeedFlare.jspx?
text=Start Blogging eBook&link=http://www.bushmackel.com/subscriber-ebook/
Change “Start Blogging eBook” to what you want.
Change the /subscriber-ebook/
You’ll need to upload your ebook to your server and create a page for the download.
July 18th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
@Mike – HA HA HA!
@Brown – Wow, thanks for the prompt answer. I’ll DEFINITELY look into doing this now!
July 18th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
I just don’t want to see people make the same mistakes I did and then have to start all over like I had to. It’s a lot of work and I am still not done getting things exactly as I want them. It’s best to get the PERFECT setup initially because transferring your blog is a hassle.
July 18th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
@Danielle – And you know, I think that that simple fact shouldn’t be overlooked. “…transferring your blog is a hassle.”
July 18th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Bush- No problem.
Hm…. well then I guess it depends on what you want to do with your blog. 
July 18th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
@Grace – Yeah, I guess that’s the bigger point in question huh? (#)\:)
July 19th, 2007 at 4:49 am
Luckily i never faced such a problem . I started a blogger blog first then after 2 days , found wordpress better . When i cam to know you cannot make modifications , i decided to go for my own space .
July 19th, 2007 at 8:27 am
@Madhur – And it looks like the rest was history. Way to go with the fast switch!
July 20th, 2007 at 10:54 am
[...] had a ton of great insight regarding choosing the wrong blogging platform, so hop on over to the post to get a [...]
July 20th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
If i were to tell my experience ..you are blogging for money or not choose only Wordpress as its worth of it….and hosting and domains are dirt cheap now….
if you don’t want to spend any money than ask yourself why you want to start blogging.
i ve also written a article on
http://www.techlivez.com/2007/07/22-reasons-why-you-should-be-at-wordpress-shifting-to-wordpress-part-1/
Wordpress simply rocks ..don’t fall for free hosting platforms.