The one and only Mark Goodacre offers his advice to potential bloggers on three basic questions: Blogger v. Wordpress; integrated interests in one blog v. separate blogs; and domain name v. “.wordpress” or “.blogspot”. I offered my own thoughts in the comments.
I think WordPress is where it’s at. Blogger has a reputation of being “simpler,” but WP seems pretty simple to me. I also appreciate the ability to add “Pages” and to track all my comments made on other WP blogs. I would recommend starting out in WP and staying there, rather than starting with Blogger and moving to WP like a lot of folks do.
The main problems with WP from my perspective are the lack of versatility. To some extent, you’re imprisoned by their pre-set options. With Blogger, you can make changes to your code, allowing you to attach codes for outside statistic sites. With WP, you’re stuck with their built-in blog stats, which aren’t bad, but they aren’t as comprehensive. With Blogger, you can forward your feed url to feedburner and therefore track your subscribers more easily. Not so in WP. I am also sad that, even though I pay money for my own domain name, my blog is still WordPress hosted and therefore I cannot make the above changes nor can I add nifty widgets available to self-hosted WP bloggers, like Logos’ RefTagger.
The answer, of course, is to host your own blog using Wordpress from Wordpress.org. You might have to learn a little, but you get versatility to your heart’s content.
Thanks, Pat, for the interesting post. Your mention of RefTagger reminded me to get it installed on my blog too.
Thanks for stopping by, jondh. From what I’ve seen, though, it costs more to do that. I only pay $15/year. Do you have suggestions to keep the cost down of self-hosting? Are there accessible tutorials to make the switch to WP.org?
The answer is to jump on board with someone else. Some cheap hosting accounts allow unlimited domain names, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited disk space. It’s a marketing plow to get customers to pick them. They know the vast majority will barely use any of that.
I pay $7 a month, but share a little bit of that cost with another guy who has his WP blog under my account. For $1 or 2 a month you could jump on with me. Or just go in with a couple of your buddies and split the cost. Cheap hosting can start for as little as $5 a month (but will probably go up a bit after the introductory term ends).
BTW, I use Host Monster and have been pretty pleased with them.
Well, you’ll always have to pay for your own domain name, although you may want to consider moving your domain to another registrar than Automattic (aka Wordpress.com) for about half the yearly charge.
When it comes to web hosting, though, there are a couple of things you can do. Phil’s suggestion sounds pretty good; never thought of doing it that way. You’ll have to make sure, though, that the host provider’s user agreement with the does not explicitly prohibit that kind of account sharing.
Another way to do it is to set up an account with a free hosting service. Some of these are pretty dodgy; many do not last very long and some require you to display their ads on their site. Some, however, are very reputable, have been around for a number of years, and offer very good services. Although you’ll have limits placed on you (e.g. a certain amount of space, a certain number of domain names, a certain amount of databases, etc.), these are usually more than sufficient for hosting your own blog. Who needs “unlimited” everything anyway unless they run a media-heavy site, online gaming service, or internet store?
I use three services that I really like and am happy to recommend them. I won’t post the links to avoid getting shut out by your spam filter, but they can easily be find with a search:
1. Byet hosting
2. hosthelpers.com
3.BlackAppleHost.com
You will have to spend a little bit of time learning how to manage your site and uploading and installing Wordpress, but resources are plentiful, and you can always ask other blogger friends. Wordpress.org offers detailed instructions on what to upload, how to install, and how to migrate your wordpress.com blog to your own site. It’s as simple as export>import.
My one piece of advice with any web host, paid or free, is DO NOT install Wordpress with any automatic installer (like Fantastico). Fantastico will set up your PHP database in an non-unicode format and then you will not able to use anything on your blog but Latin characters. No Greek, Hebrew or anything. Better install Wordpress yourself, even if it does take a little extra work.