When it comes to hosting a blog, there are only two ways to do it: host it yourself on your own server, or sign up for a free account with Wordpress.com, Blogger, or any of the other free blogging platforms. While signing up for a free account at Wordpress.com is certainly the quickest and easiest way to get going, many find that eventually they want to have more control over their blog. Hosted platforms like Wordpress.com have tons of capabilities and the feature set grows all the time, but there are several limitations that can end up being deal breakers when it comes to growth, management, and customization.
Hosting your own blog is an absolute must for your business; it provides a strong anchor to grow your presence online and substantiate your credibility.
Here are 5 reasons to host your blog yourself:
1.) You can have your own domain name.
From a marketing position, this is clearly a huge advantage over having a hosted blog. Having a blog with a free hosted provider like Wordpress.com or Blogger means that your blog URL is ugly, long and confusing to your customers. The URL will look something like this: yourdomain.wordpress.com or yourdomain.blogger.com, and it screams amateur.
If you’re blogging for your business, you need to be able to say “yea, just go to www.yourdomain.com and check out our blog.” If you have to spend 10 minutes explaining the URL and spell it out on a sticky note for them, then you’ll never get them to your site.
Now, of course, there are tons of tricks to get around the ugly URL. You can do what I used to do and buy a domain name at Godaddy and just forward the domain name to the hosted blog url. And, from the perspective of keeping it clean when you are telling people where they can find you on the internet, that’s fine – but, it can seem a little confusing when they get there and the actual domain url in the address bar looks different than what they typed in.
When you host your own blog, you’ll have the site files on your server. Once you set up the domain name on your server and someone types in www.yourdomain.com, they’ll actually see your site and the URL will stay the same in the address bar, just the way it should, neat and clean.
2.) Self-hosted blogs have unlimited theme and design options.
When it comes to styling your self-hosted blog, you are only limited by your imagination. There are virtually unlimited free theme selections, plus the premium theme market is quickly growing with some very good options.
Just as a side note, premium themes are different than free themes in that they typically have:
- A lot more detail in the design and overall styling
- Ttypically have tons of customizations that can be made via a back-end control panel,
- And offer support for trouble shooting, further customization and theme updates.
There is usually a cost that ranges from $20 to $200 depending on a variety of options and it is usually worth every penny. We’ll discuss the advantages of premium themes in a later post.
When you have a self-hosted blog, the sky is the limit when it comes to the number of customizations you can make. Not only do you have an unlimited theme selection, but you can customize any theme by physically altering the CSS, graphical elements throughout the site, editing the raw code, you can build an entirely new theme yourself or you can hire someone else to build a new theme from scratch.
If you want a free theme in a self-hosted Wordpress setup, you can search, browse and add new free themes right from the control panel. Premium Wordpress themes are just a short Google search away.
3.) You’ll have unlimited storage capabilities.
If you host your blog with Wordpress.com or some other free service, you’ll be limited in how much actual stuff you can host on those sites. If you are just writing a bunch of text, this may not be an issue for you. But if you upload pictures or videos, you could reach some limitations with online storage.
Most web site hosting plans (affiliate link) offer unlimited storage options for a very small fee (some as low as $6 per month). When you host your blog on your own server or hosting service, the amount of stuff you can upload to your blog is limitless.
4.) You’ll be able to make money on your blog by selling advertisements.
One of the huge perks to blogging is that you create something that people want to read. And, if you’re good enough, lots of people will want to read your blog. If you are blogging for your business and trying to grow your product awareness and customer base, then you may want to advertise your own products. But if you are blogging about something else, you may want to have advertisements for other stuff. Either way, ads are not allowed on hosted blogging platforms like Wordpress.com. If you want ads, all you have to do is host your blog yourself.
5.) Use plugins to extend the functionality of your blog.
One of the things that gravitated me towards using Wordpress as a self-hosted blogging platform was the endless capability at customization and extendability. Pretty much any function you want can be achieve easily through adding a plugin. Here are some of the most common plugins I use in almost all the blogs I build:
- Feedburner Feedsmith – Converts your RSS feeds to Feedburner feeds which then allows you to be able to track how many people are subscribed to your blog’s RSS feed.
- Flickr Tag – Allows you to quickly and easily embed Flickr photo sets into your posts.
- Google XML Sitemaps – Automatically creates an sitemap that google can use to index your site with. It also notifies all the major search engines when any changes were made to your blog, including adding new posts.
- TinyMCE Advanced – This plugin adds greater functionality to the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. This is the editor you’ll use to format all your posts.
- All in One SEO Pack – Puts some custom fields into the post editor to make it easy to put SEO friendly page titles, description and keywords. This is a very important to your blog’s success.
If you are serious about using a blog to grow your business (and you should be), then hosting the blog yourself is really the only way to go. There are so many options that just aren’t available any other way. One of the main reasons you probably aren’t hosting your own blog yet is because you don’t know how to set up a hosting account, or upload via ftp, etc. I can understand that learning that can seem daunting, but I learned it a couple years back, and you can to.
Later this week I’m going to publish a post that walks you through how to choose a hosting provider, how to get your domain set up and how to install Wordpress on your own server. I think you’ll be surprised at just how easy it is.
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Here are some resources:
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Great post, Jason.
Thanks dude.
What about TypePad.com? I use it and can do everything you do with your self-hosted blog. And can access it from anywhere in the world. LOVE Typepad.
Hi Jill! I’m totally not familiar with TypePad. I know you’ve been using it and would actually be very interested in a guest post from you on your experiences with it. interested?
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