On Blogging Australia

This post is part of my lessons learned alphabetical series and follows on from F is for Friends and G is for Greatness.

I’ve been a fan of self-hosting for a long time. Get a real blog platform, get a domain name, get a hosting setup, brand yourself, and build the brand (as an aside, I am now the number one Andrew Boyd on Google after the books.google.com entry, thanks for your support, folks ).

Now that I’ve mellowed, and blogging is no longer a life-or-death struggle for Greatness, how do I feel? Would I still give the same advice?

Yes, I think I would.

There is nothing wrong with Blogger, wordpress.com or TypePad blogs that you get for free - until you want to do something serious with them.

Here’s what I wrote in the Get A Real Blog e-book back in January 2008:

For some people, the free blogs aren’t enough. Some of the reasons for looking at an alternative to free blogging are:

• Flexibility and extensibility - if you need total control over look and feel (blog theme, individual page templates, and overall layout), you may need to explore the freedom that a self-hosted blog offers,
• Making money - there is a certain amount that you can do in placing Google ads into a Blogspot blog, but if you want to pursue other money-making ideas (like third-party ad brokers) then you will need a better setup, and
• Notoriety - while not easily separable from making money, having a higher index ranking (such as Google PageRank or Technorati rank) relies heavily on brand reinforcement (in other words, the effort you put into promoting your blog name and associated domain name).

These reasons haven’t changed - if you want to have more control over your blogging environment for whatever reason, then self-hosted on your own domain name is still the way to go.

It doesn’t have to cost the earth - if you can afford an extra ten dollars a month for hosting and ten dollars a year for a domain name, then you’re in. For the polybloggers, there are hosting accounts for thirty dollars a month that allow you to host a hundred low-traffic blogs (and scarily enough, some people do have a hundred blogs). I discussed some hosting options in Get a real blog: Finding a hosting provider and transferring your domain name (and it is worth reading this post if you are interested).

What’s your hosting experience? How have you found your current setup? Is it something that you would recommend to others? If you get a finder’s fee for referrals, would you still recommend your current hosting provider to others even if the referral fee wasn’t there?