If You Don’t Take Control Of Your Site Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later
TweetImagine opening up a store in a mall somewhere, and just when the profits start rolling in, the mall decides to close down forever, but they don’t tell you. In fact, they not only fail to inform you, but they place tons of dynamite around the mall, and completely blow it to smithereens. Your store is gone in a flash, and no matter what you do, you cannot get your store and its inventory back, nor can you get compensated for the loss of any of it.
Does that scenario sound ridiculous? Of course it does. But that’s exactly the risk people take every time they create a new site/blog on a free hosting platform like Blogger or WordPress.com. At any moment, those platforms could decide, on a whim, and for any reason, to delete your site forever. Period. End of story. Buh-bye.
Let’s take a look at a recent example, shall we? Look at Ning’s latest decision to go strictly paid. Everyone who built a community on Ning has two choices now: upgrade to a paid version or lose the community. (See Ning’s Bubble Bursts: No More Free Networks, Cuts 40% Of Staff). Luckily, Ning gave a warning, so at least they didn’t just nuke communities without telling the “owners”, but it’s still a huge blow. Notice how I put “owners” in quotes? That’s because Ning is the owner, not the people who created and grew the communities. That’s the whole point I’m trying to make.
Be The Owner. Be In Control.
If you only want to blog about your cat and your lunch, and you never ever want to turn it into anything more serious or professional, then by all means, take whatever risks you want. But if you intend to build a site or blog that has a chance of earning you income, or that may become popular enough to sell someday, then I urge you to own and host your own site on your own domain. Here are the pros and cons of choosing to self-host a WordPress blog on your own domain, for example, rather than choosing the free option of wordpress.com.
Pros of self-hosting WordPress blogs:
- Credibility: A self-hosted blog on yoursite.com immediately lends more credibility and professionalism to the site than one hosted at yoursite.wordpress.com.
- Affiliate Approval: If you plan to monetize your blog with affiliate ads, you’ll only be approved by some affiliate networks if your site is on its own domain.
- Place Ads: Want to place ads of any sort on your blog? You can do that with your own self-hosted WordPress installation, but not with wordpress.com.
- Don’t Display Ads For Someone Else: You aren’t forced to display ads that makes someone else money (like wordpress.com).
- Unlimited Plugins: Choose from the vast abundance of scripts, widgets, code, and plugins that are available world-wide to enhance your blog, rather than just the few pre-approved ones that wordpress.com allows. Or make your own!
- Unlimited Themes: Choose from the vast abundance of themes that are available world-wide to beautify your blog, rather than just the few pre-approved ones that wordpress.com allows. With a self-hosted blog, you can also get a custom theme created just for you!
- Sell It: When you own your own domain and site, you can sell it any time you want. Imagine building the site into a powerhouse that gets tons of traffic and then selling it for big money. Think you can sell a popular blog hosted on wordpress.com for lots of money? Forget about it. You can’t sell yourblog.wordpress.com for even a penny.
- Move It: When you own your own domain and site, you can easily move it to another host any time you want. (WordPress.com does have an export feature, but the process isn’t as easy, because you’ll need to deal with a new domain name, losing search engine rankings for the old URLs, and redirecting old URLs to new ones to get those rankings back before the next century begins).
- No Dynamite: No worries about a free host suddenly deciding on a whim to delete your site and account. Although all hosts have terms of service rules that you have to comply with, and technically, your site and account can be deleted from your host if you break those rules, you haven’t lost the domain. You can just set up yoursite.com on another host. You can’t do that with yoursite.wordpress.com.
Cons of self-hosting WordPress blogs:
- Maintenance Is On You: You have to maintain it, upgrade it, and deal with anything you might break. This can be scary, I understand that, but it shouldn’t override all the pros listed above.
- Price: It’s not free. But it’s not expensive either.
Don’t Hand Over Control Before You Start
It’s your site. One day, it might even be your livelihood. Don’t give up the control that will make that feasible before you ever even begin. Just don’t do it.
Don’t hate me for repeating myself. Don’t give up control before you ever even begin. Just don’t do it.
Other Useful, Semi-Related Tips For Maintaining Control Over Your Site or Blog
- Don’t ever host your self-hosted blog or site at the same place where you purchased your domain. If you buy your domain from godaddy.com for instance, don’t sign up for one of their hosting plans. Why? Because then you’ll put the control of BOTH your domain name and your site’s content in one company’s hands. Some of the same problems I’ve already discussed would also apply in this situation. Use one company for your domain registrar and a different one for your hosting company to avoid having any one company be able to delete or destroy or steal your entire site (domain name and contents). I recommend Godaddy for domains and Hostgator for hosting because they meet all my needs and satisfy all the recommendations I list below, but feel free to choose whoever you want. Just don’t put all your site eggs in one company’s basket.
- I recommend choosing a host that uses Cpanel. Cpanel is a standard web host administration application and that means there’s plenty of help if you need it. It also means that you can be fairly confident that you’ll be able to access and control pretty much everything necessary in almost any situation imaginable.
- I recommend choosing a host that lets you have SSH access, for both secure access to your files and ease of moving a large site if you ever need to. (Even if you don’t know what SSH is, and never think you’ll use it, it’s good to have the option down the road).
- If you already own a site (like yoursite.com), and want to add a blog to it, install WordPress in a folder of that same domain, such as yoursite.com/blog/. Dont host your blog on a different domain from your site’s current domain. Blogs are great for generating interest and acquiring links, and ideally, you want all that interest and link-love to accumulate at yoursite.com. Although there can be some cases where placing a blog on its own domain might be useful, if you are just starting out and don’t know what those cases might be, then it’s probably not the right thing for you to do. (Remember: this tip only applies to people wanting to add a blog to an already-existing site. If you don’t already own a site, and are starting a new blog, and only a blog, then ignore this tip completely).
Disclosure: Affiliate links may be used within this post for products I recommend. They in no way affect my judgement of said products, nor do they affect the price of the product.
Tweet
Tags: Blogger, self-hosted, WordPress, WordPress.com
Share and Bookmark This Post
8 Responses to “If You Don’t Take Control Of Your Site Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later”
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
-
[...] Recently, I started off a blog post by saying “Imagine opening up a store in a mall somewhere…” In a few sentences, I told a story designed to evoke an emotional response from the reader. In the past, I’ve suggested that readers should participate in a storytelling exercise in order to sharpen this particular marketing skill. I encourage you to try that exercise. In addition to that exercise, check out a few quotes and wise words from ’round the web that touch on the subject of storytelling and emotional marketing. [...]
An ebusiness coach, web developer, Internet Marketer, SEO, and all around web geek who makes her living from home doing all of the above.
If you feel my blog has contributed to you in any meaningful way, and would like to throw some loose change into a tip jar (metaphorically speaking), a click on the donation button below would definitely be appreciated.
Donna:
I think the post is spot on – except for one thing. I’m not a fan of cPanel – I find it archaic. I’ve been hosting with GoDaddy on multiple domains and now that I’ve got the hang of it, I like the managment panel better than cPanel. I don’t know if Hostgator does this or not, but GoDaddy offers one-button installation of WordPress (and other blog platforms) with their hosting plans. For less technically inclined newbies, this can be a very good thing to get themselves onto their own domain. Plus, using the same domain registrar and hosting service also makes it user-friendly instead of having to manage these things in two places.
Otherwise, I’ve been battling for months to try to get a clients site out of Blogspot hell – Google insists the blog is spam, yet despite now 7 times going through the verification process, they still don’t get back to me or the client. Meanwhile, the blog sits idle and cannot be accessed at all. That’s just plain mean because we can’t even export the content.
Hosting our own blog is the way to go. If you’re not comfortable with that immediately, then do it as soon as you are.
Randy Duermyer’s last post ..This Week’s Work from Home Jobs + Bonus
Yes, Hostgator does offer one button installs as do many other hosts. The bad thing about custom management panels, is that the rest of the world can’t help troubleshoot or guide. If someone needs to know how to password protect a directory in Cpanel, for instance, or create a backup, a bazillion people and probably hundreds of tutorials can tell/show them how because Cpanel is ubiquitous. Also, if someone ever has to move to another host, it’s a lot easier to adjust if the management panel stays the same.
Also, I feel very strongly about not not using the same registrar and hosting service. User-friendly means nothing if you lose everything in one fell swoop. That’s just too much control over everything you own being placed in one company’s hands. I’ve seen it happen. It’s not pretty.
This is an interesting read, but I do have a concern…how do you get around the 60 lock-in that godaddy enforces?
Do you just say bye-bye to those 2 months?
Phil’s last post ..Comment by
Are you referring to the fact that if you changed your whois information within the past 60 days, GoDaddy will deny a transfer of the domain for security reasons? If so, then yeah, transferring a domain would need to wait but I’m not sure what you mean by saying bye-bye to the 2 months. And of course, if you haven’t changed the whois info in the past 60 days, then the rule just doesn’t apply. Although it can be annoying, it does make some sense in terms of trying to prevent someone from stealing your domain. Maybe not perfect sense, but some at least. If I’ve misunderstood your question, let me know.
I recently started using hostgator, and found these coupons:
HostgatorPros
1centhosting
G36FJ23ASF
HG3YD3A4CZ
HGBIGDISCOUNT
I know the coupon ’1centhosting’ works good, but I’m sure the others do as well.
Best wishes.
Hi Donna, I’m a fan of WordPress.com and I’m familiar with most of the points you mentioned here. I also have a Blogger blog and I must admit that I’ve heard many horror stories about Blogger blogs being shut down by Google and all access being taken away. On the flip side I’ve never heard anyone say this about WordPress.com. It’s true they might decide to shut down or start charging for WordPress.com blogs one day.
It’s always good to be reminded that I need to get a host soon.
Thanks.
Ileane @ Ms. Ileane Speaks’s last post ..Web Browsers – What’s Yours?
Just like to remind everyone to keep *their* sites within *their* control, as much as is possible. I hate seeing people lose what they’ve worked so hard on. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.