Self Serve Or Hosted?
By Rob Safuto on Nov 14, 2006 in Biz Ideas, Blogging, Social Media | Tags: Blogging , Business-Ideas
The folks at Big In Japan list some of the pros and cons of using a hosted blog service like Wordpress.com. Something like this could certainly start an interesting discussion. Here are some of my thoughts.
If you’re a very small firm and just learning blogging I think that hosted services like Wordpress.com, Blogger or TypePad are a good choice to get you up and running quickly and without a whole lot of technical issues. If you’re a firm with some IT resources and/or have some blogging knowledge in house then you should host your own blog.
Cost shouldn’t be too much of a factor either way since hosting your own blog in general should cost $10 per month or less.
One overriding factor pointed out in the Big In Japan blog post is that when you host your blog you have complete control over the content and how you use the blog. Other services may place restrictions on content or functionality.
Smaller firms may benefit more from the exposure you can get via hosted communities like WordPress.com. While more established brands will likely not be too thrilled with sending residual traffic to WordPress, Blogger or TypePad.
So I think that it’s okay to start out using a hosted blog service but their should be a goal and plan to eventually learn enough to host the blog yourself so that the business has complete control over brand, content and features.
[tags]Social Media, Blogging, Business Ideas[/tags]
Jake McKee | Nov 15, 2006 | Reply
Hi there! Glad you enjoyed my post on this subject - it’s a good question that I’ve seen bounced around for a while. You bring up some good points, and I’ll append the post later today with some of them.
One thing I will saw though is that I draw the line at Blogger.com. The overwhelming advertising paints a picture of cheapness and cluelessness for business bloggers. A business starting a blog on Blogger.com says “I can’t even afford to spend $4.95″ or “I’m not interested enough to give it a real chance with a professional service, but we’ll see how it works out”.
Otherwise, agree with your other discussion points!
Rob Safuto | Nov 15, 2006 | Reply
I would recommend WordPress.com over Blogger for anyone going the free route as well. Although Blogger does allow you to publish pages to your own server via FTP and there are no ads involved.
The Aksimet spam filter and trackback capabilities are the biggest reasons why I’d recommend WordPress.com.
I can’t penalize a business just getting started that chooses to have their blog hosted on the Blogger service. Sometimes people get bad advice or maybe they just don’t know any better. The choice to throw in Adsense is always a puzzling one but ads won’t necessarily appear on the blog unless the author chooses to place them there.
In short, I recommend making the investment to make sure that a blog reflects the companies brand without distraction. Adsense ads are an unnecessary distraction that definitely make a blog look cheap.
Alojamento Sites | Feb 11, 2007 | Reply
Hi,
I would definitely back up the current comments and recommend go with your own hosted solution.
Typepad or wordpress are great, but out of the 2 wordpress is the one that seems to have the most acceptance amongst bloggers and is updated and maintained by its developers on a regular basis.
Either way you are making a safe bet with both solutions, Good Luck!