Can Developer-Hosted Blogging Work?
The common perception among many bloggers is that hosting your blog on Blogger or WordPress.com won’t allow your blog to reach its full potential, especially in the number of people that will repeatedly visit your site (assuming that you haven’t purchased your own domain). Not everyone has to upgrade to a paid account – hosting/domain – in order to reap the benefits of getting off a shared/developer-hosted account.
The Five Most Common Reasons Bloggers Stick with Free Services
- The reliability of developer-hosted accounts is usually greater, as there are people working behind-the-scenes constantly trying to reduce the downtime and costs to host the millions of people that are connecting to their servers at any one minute. Additionally, many require ads to be served 24/7 in order to remain profitable, thus they try to maintain a 99.9% or greater uptime.
- Not everyone needs the advanced services that you get when you host your blog on your own server, including shared services, so there really is no need to upgrade in this case.
- Third-party hosting services aren’t hard to come by and you can easily upload all your files to these services without any concerns about cost/reliability. For example, Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket all have extremely high bandwidth and storage limits (usually greater than a gigabyte apiece). Therefore, you don’t need the extra storage that an self-hosted account would offer.
- Traffic and content isn’t great enough to generate the need. As your blog becomes larger, you might begin asking yourself whether you need the advanced services. Many people will never reach this point – you’d need to write dozens of posts daily with hundreds of images before you start noticing any major changes in how your blog functions.
- Free. This is a large factor of how people decide whether to upgrade or not. Hosting costs have come down as storage technology has matured, although there are still costs involved. For example, even with basic hosting (unless you come by a good deal), you will have to pay $10 for the domain yearly plus upwards of $100 a year for hosting. To some, this doesn’t seem necessary for a hobby that they can continue doing for free.
Conclusion
As long as your are content with the blog platform you are using and don’t see any obvious reasons to switch providers, you don’t need to do so. However, the best decision in this is to choose the option that is the most affordable, has the most complete set of features, and appeals to both you and your readers. Again, developer-hosted plans that are free appeal to so many because they are fairly complete and easy to use – there is no major setup involved, and most optimization has already been implemented as soon as you sign up for your account.
What are your thoughts on these services – do they work for you or do you want something that can do more, add more value to your site, etc.?
Note: Remaining on the developer-hosted (Blogger and WordPress) accounts may be ideal for many people as long as they don’t need the resources required to upgrade accounts or pay for extra services and add-ons. That may be the reason why many are still content with what they offer, compared to the advanced, and sometimes unnecessary features involved in hosting on your own server.
I agree with everything you said here. Not all bloggers need a self-hosted blog especially if they don’t want to deal with the technical aspect of hosting. It’s just not for everybody.
Free blog hosting like Blogger and Wordpress.com are great services and most bloggers don’t need anything more than those. If all they want is a place to post their daily thoughts, free hosting is right for them.
For me, the main reason I suggested people to consider self-hosting is if they intend to eventually monetize their blog. For this reason alone, self-hosting would be better.
I agree with you that not everyone needs to upgrade specially those who blog for hobby but what opinion do you have of people who want to earn also from their blog?
Is it possible to earn even with a blogger blog?
Or does the task become much easier with own domain and self-hosting?
I used to have a real bias against Blogger and other free blogs. However, as more people use them, including some high quality blogs, I find that it is not a factor anymore. I like the freedom of paying for my hosting, but I can now see that it is not for everyone.
@Commenters – Thank you for your thoughts and comments.
@vivek – In terms of making money with Blogger and other free services, it all depends on how unique you are. You would have to put a lot more effort into promoting the whole fact that you are not at http://site.com/ but http://site.blogspot.com/, which is an entirely different situation.
As long as you aren’t limited with how you can customize your sidebars and template, it shouldn’t be a major problem, as long as you don’t break any of the developer’s (Blogger’s) terms.
In a sense, no matter what you do, until you accept the fact that it takes time and effort to generate an income from any type of blog, it will be difficult to reach those goals.