See the bottom of the post for updates on my adventures with shared hosting..
My experience in selfhosting my blogs with GoDaddy moved from a glowing enthusiasm via consternation and frustration into a deep distrust and disbelief. In this post, I want to take you through the past year, as I discovered some of the issues one should know before choosing a selfhosting service.
Much is written about hosting your own blog and how to choose your hosting company. Whole blogs are dedicated to attracting customers to this or that hosting supplier, a clear sign hosting is big business.
I will not analyse which hosting company is the best, nor what the pros and cons of all hosting companies or hosting formulae are. Others are more qualified to do so. But… as with most items we cover on BlogTips, I want to share my experience, hoping others will learn from my many mistakes. My experience concentrated mainly around GoDaddy.com, one of the biggest and cheapest hosting companies around.
If you use WASH as a noun, rather than a verb, you gotta be working in the humanitarian field. WASH stands for “WAter, Sanitation and Hygiene”, one of the key sectors in the field of aid and development.
As with any nonprofit area, advocacy, information dissemination and project discussions are key to the WASH sector, so it was to no surprise I recently came across a whole bunch of WASH-related blogs (see bottom).
Now, it’s not the first time I stumble upon a series of interconnected blogs around a common theme. Often these blog projects start with a lot of enthusiasm, migrating into a general frustration about the amount of time it takes to update all of them.
They often end up in the waste bin labelled “Abandoned Blogs”.
Not so with the WASH blogs-“family”, which have been updated regularly since the past three years.
An interesting slide set by social media guru Beth Kanter, showing how social media can be used as a marketing tool – specifically for non-profit organisations.
Some of the slides contain details you will only see when watching the slide show in full screen (click on the menu icon – Choose “Full screen”)..
777, Seven hundred seventy-seven.
That is the amount of nonprofit blogs I have collected so far. They are all on my Delicious bookmarking list. Excerpts from their posts are republished on Humanitarian News and The NonProfit Blogs.
777, discarding blogs which have not been updated since six months. 777, including the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. [...]
If you don’t selfhost your blog, skip this post. It talks about a common problem all of us, selfhosters have. But if you don’t selfhost, you’re immune to this disease, which has as symptoms:
anxiety attacks,
dizzy spells,
recurring nightmares,
adversity to “check for upgrades” or even “admin menus” buttons,
and above all: fierce regret to [...]
In my tutorial series “Blogging 101 – Starting a blog from scratch” I have already covered the basic question many nonprofit organisations ask themselves: “Does my organisation need a blog?”
There was one issue I did not highlight, though: Blogging is a kind of crowd sourced knowledge management.
What do I mean by that? An example:
For years, bloggers cursed the lack of a real preview function in Blogger, one of the most popular blog platforms.
After you wrote a blogpost, the ‘old’ preview button used to bring up a pop-up screen which gave a ‘kinda’ preview of your post, which did not take into account most styling options you had in [...]
More and more people browse blogs from their mobile devices. While you can view any website from your iPhone or Blackberry, the pages will appear with a very small font, and the whole thing will look very cramped, unless if the website supports a mobile theme. Only then, the site will appear suitable for easy [...]
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, blogger, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. (
