BECOME A BLOGGER: FREE BLOG SITES VERSUS SELF HOSTED

ByGnomeAngel

Free Vs Self Hosted

Now you’ve got your name sorted (or you’re at least thinking about a possible name) it’s time to think about what platform (click for definition) you’re going to use.

Think of it in terms of choosing a Mac versus PC, or an xBox versus Playstation, or Pepsi versus Coke. It just comes down to personal preference and circumstances. There’s no right or wrong answer on this one.

The 2 most popular free blog platforms are Blogger and WordPress.com. However, there is a third option: self hosted (click for definition).

The best analogy I’ve head for this comes from Tasha (of Designer Trapped in a Lawyer’s Body), and I’m going to paraphrase here:

Blogger and WordPress.com are like renting a house, self hosting is like owning a house.

If you choose to use Blogger and WordPress.com it’ll be free (yay!) but you’ll have limited control over your blog customization (boo!).

Now, at first the options available through a free blog platform seem overwhelming and limitless but just like everything in life the more you work with it the more you’ll learn and sure enough there will come a point in time when you want to be able to do more.

If you go for a self hosted (you register your domain name and get a hosting package from a hosting service) you’ll most likely use WordPress – this version of WordPress is referred to as WordPress.org.

There’s some great posts available that go through and list all the considerations between going with a free option (Blogger and WordPress.com) or self hosting via WordPress.org:

  • My Biggest Blogging Mistake and How I Fixed it – a great article the outlines some fabulous pro’s and con’s about which platform to choose.
  • How to Make My Blog – this is a great article on the pro’s and con’s of which platform to choose.
  • Spot Cool Stuff – for those that are visual (like me) I love the infograph in this post that shows the differences between self hosted WordPress and free WordPress
  • CoSchedule Blog – I love this article because it shows a different spin on why it’s in your best interest to be self hosted.

What choice did I make?

My blog is self hosted. I own my domain (www.gnomeangel.com) and I pay for a hosting service. (I use VentraIP – this is not an affiliate link, I just really like using them and so am happy to tell you all about it.)

I chose this option because it gave me the most flexibility and I never really enjoyed reading blogs on the Blogger platform so I knew I didn’t want to head there. (It really bugs me that you can’t see responses to comments on Blogger – the blog owner goes to the trouble to respond and that is lost and so other readers miss out on some of the gold that’s often found in comment threads.)

I really love WordPress because it’s really intuitive (if you can use Microsoft Word you can use WordPress), there’s heaps of free plugin’s available and I’ve found over the years that I can change the look and feel of my blog with relative ease and little coding knowledge.

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10 Comments

  3. Feedly only showed the first page of this post, so I was all set to tell you the story of when I had to introduce myself to about 30 people as ‘warthog’ after an ill advised name choice. But then I discovered the rest of your post… And it was great.

    1. Yes, sorry about that – for some reason the page aggregation doesn’t work as a feed. Works on bloglovin’ but everything else is cactus. Trying to find a fix for it. (It’s on my to-do list.) Will need you to elaborate on the “warthog” incident please. 🙂

    1. Hello! Thanks for the link – have been over and checked it out and added you to my bloglovin’ feed so I can keep up with all your amazingness.

  5. having had a read of this you’ve half convinced me I need to move to self hosted and use wordpress but I don’t want to lose all my work and stats so I don’t know if it’s worth it. hmmm

    1. Hello! You can import really simply from blogger to wordpress once you’ve made the move. Not all your formatting may come across, and some images may not be transferred, but the content will come across. If you’re using google analytics (and if you’re not you should be 🙂 ) you won’t loose your stats – you just put the same code you have on your blogger blog into your wordpress blog. The brilliant thing about wordpress is there’s millions of tutorials (and video tutorials at that) available that can help you with almost anything and when that fails there’s a tonne of groups/forums that can help too. Not to mention if you put a call out on twitter for help heaps of people will volunteer advice and fixes. The internet is a most wonderful place for helping. 🙂

  6. Angie that was great,real lesson about blogging. Just few days ago I swapt from Blogger to WordPress. So much easier than Blogger. Or maybe I was problem,what ever I tried to do it didn’t work…hm. Then I read and compere blogs and decided to switch to WordPress. It is few days now that I’m using new blog and still have things to organise but I’m happy.
    Thanks Angie:)

    1. Hi Zehrina – I’m so glad there was useful information in this post for you. I hope you love using wordpress as much as I do, it’s so great being able to customise and tweak. I loose hours playing with the site. Let me know if you need any help with anything, happy to help where I can. 🙂

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