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.

My first steps into the hosting world:

I have been blogging for over three years. My first blogs were hosted by Blogger, WordPress, Skynet and Tumblr. Later on, I also started some blogs on Posterous. About two years into blogging, I thought it was about time to take more control over my blogs and to selfhost some of them.

As with many things in life, I found myself walking a road, unconscious of the direction I took, and soon enough, found myself in a middle of a mediaeval battlefield with all kinds of things happening I had no control over, no influence on the outcome, nor did I have the faintest clue “how the **&&%% I got there”. Let me explain: I choose GoDaddy.com as my hosting provider. It was not a calculated choice, but Godaddy was the service Google used as a registrar when I registered the domain of my very first blog. The migration from a Blogger domain to my own, went fast and transparently, so I thought GoDaddy would also be the way to go for hosting services too. Little did I know that domain registration and hosting services are two completely different things.

Via GoDaddy’s home page, I found a link to their selfhosting services, and registered. Not really thinking what I choose for. “Linux economy plan” smelled about right. And at less than US$4/month for 10 Gb of diskspace and 300 Gb/month of traffic, what could go wrong? Right? So before I knew it, I started walking the road of “Shared Linux Servers” selfhosting.

PLUS: shared hosting services are cheap
PLUS: shared hosting services provide loads of diskspace and high internet traffic quota

Starting my first selfhosted blog Have Impact was a breeze. When I registered the domain, I could select the hosting service I wanted. The DNS entries – the link between the domain and the physical space where my blog lives – were done automatically. Installing WordPress was just a matter of clicking a few buttons and I had a blog up and running in minutes.

PLUS: a fast and transparent link between the domain registration
PLUS: an easy “Pay and Go” solution which brings up a website in no time
PLUS: easy and fast installation of the blogging software

I thought: “Why did I not do this earlier?”

A clear blue sky

Using a selfhosted WordPress.org blog is pretty much like using a blog on WordPress.com, where your blog is hosted by WordPress themselves. But it gave me more freedom to install and tweak themes and plugins, making my blog do exactly what I wanted.

All fine so far. Apart from a bit of a surprise how much time it took to ensure my blogsoftware, themes and plugins were kept up to date with the latest software releases, I was a happy camper: My blog was puttering along nicely, with a few dozen posts, updated once or twice a week, and a few thousand visitors a month.

PLUS: For a low traffic, simple blog shared hosting services are just fine.

So I continue walking on that path: I created several other blogs hosted by Godaddy, amongst which your very own BlogTips, this blog. Before I knew it, I had a dozen selfhosted blogs, all on GoDaddy. I even started a Drupal site, Humanitarian News.

The first signs of trouble

The latter took off into cyberspace like a rocket, with loads of content and more visitors every month. It was also the first site I experienced problems with. Problems I would also encounter with my other blogs later on: The increased traffic and the amount of posts I published forced me to tweak the site continuously: I applied aggressive caching and stripped it off all functions that had a bad influence on its performance. Soon I was forced into the Drupal internals, PHP/MySQL tweaks and all other stuff a naive blogger like myself should keep his hands off. Really… Soon enough, I needed help. As GoDaddy promised 24h/7d telephone and email support, I thought nothing could go wrong.

I learned their Email support did not work well. Most of the time, the answers I got were off-topic, or not to the point, and looked like pre-cooked “cut-and-paste” replies. It honestly felt like they let you go through a couple of to-and-fro iterations to ensure you are persistent enough, and you “really have a problem”, before you do get a real answer…

As most of my issues were performance related, most of the time, their answer was a standard “we see your site might be loading a bit slow, but we advise you to”… and then came an explanation on how to increase the speed of a website by compressing pictures, etc… Even though none of my performance issues had anything to do with the web-side (or front-end) of the chain of events, but were rather concentrated on the back-end.

The more I insisted, the more frequent the “end the discussion now”-killer sentence came: “We don’t see any performance issues on your shared server, but if you want better performance, we suggest you upgrade to a hosting package XYZ”… Which implied moving all my data myself, at a significant higher price tag. Beh..

Shared hosting = shared trouble

As time went by, I discovered I took the cheapest and most unreliable of all packages: a shared host. Meaning, I shared the machine my blog ran on, with thousands of other users, rather than having a machine to myself. Other formulae were “dedicated virtual hosting” services (where you run on your own virtual machine) or “dedicated hosting” (where you run on your own physical machine)…

Minus: Shared hosting is not a good idea for high traffic sites
Minus: There is little or no performance to be expected from shared hosts
Minus: Email support seldom leads to actual solutions. Real support is only possible via telephone.
Minus: Most Email support mostly consists of standard cut-and-paste answers.

The more I used the support services, the more I discovered problems: each time I called or emailed, I got another person on the line. Who might or might not do the effort of reading through the history of problems. Who might or might not be knowledgeable. Who might or might not be interested or motivated to really help you.

Minus: There is not a single focal point for each account, nor a focal team. The quality of support really depends on the person.

Consumer rights

Around late last year – I also discovered other problems. The top of the iceberg, it seemed. One of my websites ran significantly slower than all others. The lack of speed had nothing to do with my blog itself, nor the posts: Just about anything I did in the WordPress dashboard was at least ten times slower than on any of my other blogs. I found out the IP address from the server on which “the slow blog” was running, was in a different range from the servers of my other blogs. I gathered it ran on a different server array, or even ran in another location. That seemed like an obvious explanation of the source of the problem: the slower website must have a server with a resource problem: CPU, bandwidth, memory, load etc…

It was by then I also started see some variations in performance on my other blogs, including this very same blog, BlogTips. At times the site would load THAT slow, browsers would time out. WordPress admin functions would take minutes rather than seconds. The problem would persist for about half an hour and by the time I called or emailed support, the problem disappeared… To re-appear a few hours later, or on the following day, or the following week, or the following month.

Next thing I knew, the CRON jobs on Humanitarian News stopped working. CRON is the mechanism scheduling and executing background jobs such as indexing your site for the internal search. CRON is particularly important on Humanitarian News as it also imports posts from RSS feeds. No CRON, no new posts…
Once more the answer from GoDaddy’s support desk was similar to previous issues: at first there was a denial there was a problem, but when I persisted, they confirmed there was indeed a problem, but were unable to tell me when the problem would be resolved. Nor could they inform me by email when the problem was resolved. This also made me realize there is no system to actually ‘close’ a support ticket. A support issue seems to be closed the moment the client gives up, or when the answer is ‘we know of the problem, and it will be resolved. Bye!’…

Minus: When there is a recognized problem that can not be cured on the spot, support often can not give you a time frame when it will be resolved, nor will they contact you when the problem is actually resolved.
Minus: There is no system to close support tickets

That made me think about consumer rights… I guess I had only one right: To leave… But for the rest, it seemed I had no way to escalate a problem, or to appeal to what I felt was unfair consumer treatment. Imagine you buy a car, and the engine stops. You can drive it downhill, but for the rest, you won’t get far unless if you push it. And the garage won’t be able to tell you when the problem will be resolved. Would you accept that?

The first step to recovery, is to recognize one is ill

Despite repeated emails to the support service, little I could do to convince them about most of the performance problems. True, I used to manage DEC VAX and PDP systems twenty years ago, but Linux is not my thing and I have no system tools at my finger tips. I could not measure the actual performance of my site. But to my surprise, it seemed they did not have much of the tools neither to measure, monitor or benchmark performance issues on shared hosts. And even less tools to analyse and/or cure the problems. I witnessed  little eagerness, willingness (or ability?) to check performance logs.
Nor could anyone tell me what performance I could expect. What metrics were used? I figured I basically signed a blank cheque.

Minus: There is no benchmark or agreed performance to be expected from shared hosts.
Minus: There is hardly any action taken on performance complaints

On some single occasions, I had GoDaddy admit there were actual problems on my shared server, but then their answer often was: “In the mean time, the problem has been resolved, please revert if you experience similar problems”.

It was then I also discovered:

Minus: there is no refund for downtime, nor a money-back guarantee for dis-satisfied customers

Signing a blank cheque

As Humanitarian news continued to grow, I learned there were several system limits which are undocumented or rather grey-ishly documented: the fact that you can have 10 SQL databases per hosting service is fine, but none of them can be larger than 1 Gigabyte… If it grows larger than 1 Gigabyte, you can not back it up. Punto. It was also difficult to find what the maximum memory size. And there was no way to increase any of these. Virtual shared hosting formulae were not modular in design. Take or leave the standard formulae…
It was also difficult for me to analyse the problem as I had limited access to error logs.

Minus: Undocumented or poorly documented limitations of the hosting service.
Minus: No PHP-error log access.

Hackers aboard

Then came the April-May debacle of the massive shared host hacks. Several of my GoDaddy hosted websites got infected. Even though I cured the sites quickly, several sites went down repeatedly. I spent hours curing the infections the hackers left behind. Meanwhile Godaddy did not admit guilt, and continued to point the finger-of-blame towards WordPress and the individual users.
I discovered how little repercussion the clients of (shared) hosting services really had. None of the hacks happened on dedicated hosts, the security holes apparently only happened on shared hosts.

Minus: Shared hosting services are more vulnerable to hackers’ attacks

I discovered how little support was given for the applications running on the hosting service: few of the support people actually understood Drupal, or WordPress, or Apache, or MySQL…, something which is not clearly stated when you sign up for a hosting service:

Minus: Application support is limited.

The past few weeks, the problems with Humanitarian News got from bad to worse.The SQL server completely failed on several occasions, it timed out most others. This caused all kinds of database errors, which took days and days to resolve. I got mixed up into a whirl of snowball effects…

The apotheosis

It felt like the support desk would no longer put up with my persistent complaining on the lack of performance on their services: A few days ago, I received an email my website was put offline “as I used up too many resources”:

It has come to our attention that your humanitariannews.org hosting account, specifically the humxxx database is causing the shared resources to be over-utilized. This, in turn, affects the usage by other customers.

We have disabled your database to return the server to normal usage. To re-enable your database, you will need to correct the following query:

Access is revoked. Problematic query:
SELECT t.word AS realword, i.word FROM search_total t LEFT JOIN search_index i ON t.word = i.word WHERE i.word IS NULL

EXPLAIN:
id select_type table type possible_keys key key_len ref rows Extra
1 SIMPLE t index PRIMARY 152 266794 Using index
1 SIMPLE i ref word_sid_type,word word 152 humxxx.t.word 29 Using where; Using index; Not exists

This query examines 7737026 rows, which is unacceptable in shared hosting.

Please respond to this message via email or phone with the steps you will take or have taken, to correct this issue, and access to your database can be restored.

Admittedly the timing of this was rather weird. Anyways, I figured out the offending query was caused by the standard Drupal “Search” function. I disabled it, and it took GoDaddy 20 hours to bring the website back up. I asked them what the metrics they used to determine what resource consumption was acceptable and what was not. I am waiting for the answer.

Minus: There are unclear metrics used on the use of shared resources

I was given administrator rights to the entire server.

Interestingly enough, when they gave me back the access to my own database, something really weird happened: I went into PHPMyadmin, to look at my SQL database and did not find the usual two databases, but over 2,400 databases. I clearly had access to the databases from all other users on my shared server.

And I found dozens of processes on my server too:

By error, I was given access to all 2,400 databases and all processes on my shared hosts. I could delete 2,400 websites right there on the spot. Or I could play cat and mouse, and delete random SQL processes, and see how long it would take before Godaddy caught me.

Honestly lasts longer, though. I called them. Was put on hold for 12 minutes. Talked to a support guy. Who did not really seem to believe me at first. Then forwarded the request to the hosting experts, and thanked me for reporting the problem.

It took them a few hours to take away my “administrator” access on the shared server. This did not particularly strengthen my belief in the rigidness of the shared server management. And, just as before this incident, I could still read everyone’s access log (the log registering who does what on a website). Godaddy is still checking if ‘that is normal’ or not. (Update: GoDaddy support confirmed it was normal I could read everyone’s access log)

Access logs for a site called "humongous"

Minus: “Shared hosting” and “security” are two words that should not be used within the same sentence.

I *did* get an email from “the office of the President” – that is the president of “GoDaddy.com”, and not of “the United States”, to thank me for reporting the security problem, saying they tried to call me to see if the issue was resolved.

I wrote them back stating the only way they could show their gratitude to me, and to their thousands of customers, was to monitor and cure their performance problems on the shared hosting servers…

So what did I learn from all of this:

• There are many hosting formulae, and many hosting suppliers. Choosing the right one is as critical as choosing the plot of land on which you will build your house.
• GoDaddy Shared Hosting Services are only good for low traffic, low demand websites.
• Technical support from Godaddy is limited, and only effective when you call.
• If your website is critical, and you want a guaranteed performance and uptime, shared hosting is not what you want. Certainly not from Godaddy. Go for dedicated (virtual) hosts.

The bottom line:

Am I pissed off? Kinda.. Mostly on myself. What kind of support would I have expected when paying US$4/month? Indeed: when you pay peanuts, you can only get monkeys.

I am now looking for another hosting formula, on another hosting provider. I will keep you in the loop of my discoveries in “Blogging Never-Ever-Land”.

Updates:

1. One day after publishing this post, once again, BlogTips.org gave time-out errors. After half an hour online with the support services, they admitted there was a load problem on the server. They said it would typically take 3 days to resolve.
   Meanwhile another site gave “500 Internal Error” problems, which turned out to be a DNS setting which was changed. How? I still don’t know. — GoDaddy confirmed later on that this was a new option people could set. Apparently there was a problem in the migration.
2. Meanwhile, it seems that the option causing the DNS error is taken away from all hosting accounts…
3. I continued to experience problems, mostly time-outs when loading pages, but also performance problems with the SQL database. Godaddy support suggested I moved my shared hosting accounts to grid hosting, a process which can be done by the click of a button.
   Indeed, the migration process was fast and flawless.
   Let’s see if the performances gets better.
4. After migrating all but one of my hosting accounts to grid hosting, most of them started to give time-outs upon loading. Godaddy let me do a TRACERT to my domains, which showed on all but one, time-outs.
5. After 5 days of “we’re working on it”, I got a mail saying “Solved!”, but it failed at the first test. After that, for three days, I got “Working on it, but can not say when it would be resolved”.
6. The rest of my sites started to give “500 Internal errors”. I can’t wait for this holiday to end so I can migrate all my hosting accounts off Godaddy.
7. On July 20, Godaddy publishes an update on their support website: “We’re aware of an issue within our Grid Hosting services impacting a few customers. While we’re fixing it, you might experience longer than normal phone support hold times. Thanks for your patience.”
   ..a few customers… Right…
8. GoDaddy confirmed by telephone that TRACERT of one’s own domain should give a time-out as soon as the route enters their domains, as a security precaution. Makes me wonder then why I can do a TRACERT of all my domains I tried, except the one for the site which was unreachable… Beh.

Pictures of “Tintin and The Seven Crystal Balls” and “Tintin, Destination Moon”, courtesy Editions Casterman.

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 ever have gotten to this stage where you are considered a “webmaster”, but deep down inside you realize you know shit, and that big “Internet Publishing” monster is far bigger and more powerful than you will ever be.

But as you are here, welcome. Welcome into this safe space. This is the selfhosters’ cocoon. You don’t have to click any critical upgrade buttons here. You are safe here… Everything will be OK! (soft music playing in the background, a bunny-dressed waitress brings you your favourite drink,..)

<pink off> Where were we? Oh, right, back to the post. We were talking about dreaded upgrades…

Do you have that feeling too? Do you stare at the “Upgrade available – Click here” prompt… For your laptop software, your iPhone applications, you know what that might mean: “Heaven or Hell”… Either you get additional functionality, or “The World As You Know It” will crash. For the former, you’re cool until the next week when more upgrades are available. In case of the latter, you’ll be busy downgrading, retrofitting, restoring backups and patching for the rest of the night.

Upgrading your iPhone and laptop is one thing, but upgrading your blog, is another. If you fail, you can’t keep it private. When you website crashes, it is there for the world to know. You’re then just waiting for the first tweet from one of your visitors:

"www.yoursite.com is down again. Daaah. #FAIL"

But still, you know, to be “part of the bunch”, you really should click that button, and upgrade. Although, for myself, I have to admit, half of the time I don’t really know why I should upgrade. Hardly any of the upgrades give me additional functionality I have really been waiting for. When reading through the upgrade notes, I rarely come across anything I need, or even understand. Know that feeling?
And yet the feeling of “I have to execute that upgrade”, is compulsive. I don’t really know why. Probably because I don’t want to be left out. Because it somewhere guarantees that my plugins remain compatible one to another. Or it might solve a bug I have not come across yet. Or I don’t want to skip upgrades for several months, only to realize half a year down the line none of my plugins are compatible anymore with a really needed upgrade, a security patch for instance. And we all know what a drag it is to go through six months of delayed upgrades, and how all the possible conflicts would then be condensed into one major upgrade, increasing your chance of:

"www.yoursite.com is down again. Daaah. #FAIL"

I have about 10 selfhosted sites. Most on WordPress and Drupal. I use plugins (or modules in Drupal) sparingly, and restrict myself only to those I really need. Here on BlogTips, I have 15 of them. A pretty average number I have across all of my blogs. On most sites I actually use the same plugins. Even so, I get about two to five upgrade notifications per week. Per week…. Two to five chances to wake up in hell.

Sure enough, just like any conscientious blogger, I have a test site where I try out the upgrades first. (You have one too, right? Right????) If my testblog survives the plugin upgrade, I do the upgrades on my life blogs. But it is a drag. It is something as a blogger, I don’t look forward to. I want to concentrate on writing content, not on dealing with all of that “webmaster” stuff…

Then comes the time, where the ultimate nightmare comes. A major upgrade of your blogsoftware is released. Like this weekend’s WordPress 3.0 release.
Don’t get me wrong, I love WordPress. I think it is -hands down- the best blogging software around. I love the idea such a piece of quality software is put in the public domain, free for all to use. I love the idea that hundreds of software developpers all over the world contribute to it. I love the user forums and support infrastructure. I also love that, compared to any software, the bugs are few and the functionality is great.

WordPress 3.0 will for sure give me additional functionality. Some of it, I want. Some of it, I could not care less about.

• It has a new default theme, called Twenty Ten. – Mmm, don’t use the default themes.
• Theme developers get new APIs to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus, post types, and taxonomies. – Thankyouverymuch, but I am not a theme developer
• MU and WordPress have now merged into one product, allowing you to create multiple blogs with one installation – Which I don’t need. Not at this moment anyway.
• Contextual help on every admin screen — Nice, but I hardly ever use the help screens.
• Proper menus – Ah something I really looked forward to. But you can only use it, if your theme supports menus. Some of mine don’t. But I have to admit, this, together with the taxonomy feature would make WordPress move closer into the functionality of a proper CMS (Content Management System), which is something I firmly believe in…
• Bulk updates so you can upgrade your theme, your 15 plugins and WordPress all with a single click – Something I don’t use, as I want to upgrade them one by one, just in case anything goes wrong.
• 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements – Oh dear, that many bugs?

Again, don’t get me wrong. Let me restate it clearly: I <heart> WordPress. And watching their release video, I can be nothing but enthusiastic about the work the team does:

But then again, my heart beats faster when I look at that dreaded “Upgrade Now” button. “To upgrade or not the upgrade”, that is the question.

As you know, on BlogTips I mostly write about stuff I am confronted with, as an average Joe Blogger. And stuff people ask me. So the question is indeed, upgrade or not? Well the first thing I did, is go to the WordPress support forums, and look at the upgrade problems people are faced with. While the WordPress 3.0 forum seems to be closed, most of the issues seem to be in the Installation forum. Browsing through the topics I see:

• There are some issues with hosting services:
  

  just finished chatting with Hostgator support and they’ve told me everyone is having issues installing wp3 – so they don’t recommend it for now.

• There are some issues with the memory size on hosting services, where 32 Mb does not seem to be sufficient. The work around by changing the memory limit in the php.ini and wp-config.php file seem to work around that, but I really can not remember what the memory limit is for the hosting service I use. And of course a search on Godaddy for “memory limit Linux hosting” returns ziltch.
• Some plugins are clearly not compatible, or are conflicting with WP 3.0. Some themes might have problems.
• And of course the worse of the worse, the blogmaster’s nightmare:
  

  I tried to upgrade to Wordpress 3.0 today. I did an automatic update, told me it was successful. Then I tried to go to another page in the dashboard and it gave me an error message.

Given the fact there are 10 million installations of WordPress in the world, I am sure there will be some issues popping up. We live in an imperfect world. The more as the quality control of plugins and themes is really left to the individual developpers. But, browsing through the forum, there does not seem to be a general ” #FAIL ” outcry. That is positive.

So what to do next? I quietly upgraded one of my test blogs. And..

…it worked fine. The new functionality was there (apart from the fact that my theme did not support menus). Writing and publishing new posts seemed to work. None of my plugins puffed out, and all seems to be happy-happy. So what was all the fuzz about? Were my fears really unfounded?

What to do next? Well, I will sit on my hands, and wait. I will weather the storm for a while. There are those who love to sail in fierce winds, but I am not that kind of sailor. I take the safe route. I will wait for a while, keep my ship at bay, and see what the others come up with. And wait for some inevitable bug fixes. That is what I am going to do.

And I will live with the fact that for the next couple of weeks, I will dream of only one thing:

Update July 16 2010:
Since publishing this post, I have successfully upgraded three blogs to WordPress 3.0, including one rather unconventional RSS based site. I had no problems thus far.
I am still waiting to upgrade my remaining sites.

For anyone taking blogging seriously, “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” is serious stuff. SEO is the craftmanship involved in improving the volume and quality of traffic search engines generate to your website or blog.
As I described in my “Understanding the traffic on your blog” primer, a large part of your visitors stumble upon your blog by accident, through a search engine. In my case study, about 40% of new visitors to be precise. Serious business.

And for anyone interested in SEO-stuff, Matt Cutts is a serious man. He works at Google, and goes to great length in assisting webmasters making their sites more accessible, crawable and searchable for search engines.

I am republishing the video above, as it gives some really down to earth hints on common SEO problems and pitfalls, sometimes too obvious for us to consider. Watch it, it is an hour well spent.

Video courtesy Matt Cutts

"Google Browser Size" revisits the optimum blog width

In a previous post, we looked at the optimum “blog real estate”: the surface of your blog which is visible on a visitor’s browser window. I mentioned that, according to the statistics from 350,000 visitors my main blog, 91% was using a monitor width of 1,024 pixels or more. Based on that, I suggested you lay out your blog to a maximum width of  1,000 pixels (or anything between 950 and 1,000).

Google Labs just released “Google Browser Size”, a simple and coarse visualization of that recommendation: it takes a faded image of your site, and overlays it with a set of contours, showing “how many people see what of your site”. For example, the “90%” contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger. The tool confirms our claim: 90% (I said 91%) see 1,000  pixels wide.

My first reaction was: “OMG, I am missing 10% of my audience with all my sites having 1,000 px widths.” Then again, “the useful” and “the optimal” are sometimes two different things: I would not want to change my blog width to 600 px, just to reach that 1% who still uses ancient hardware or software. Nor would I change it to 800 px to reach that extra 5%.

And that is not what this tool encourages you to do neither: Mostly, Google Browser Size is a handy tool to remind you which important parts of your homepage fall outside of how many people’s browser window. If your ‘donate now’ or similar buttons on a fundraising blog fail to be hit 10% of your audience, then I’d suggest to move it.

(Google + Feedburner) = Death_of (Twitterfeed + RSS2Twitter +DLVR.it) ?

I have posted before about how you can capitalize on your Twitter social community to increase traffic onto your blog. Regularly tweeting the new posts on your blog is the secret. I tweet a few thousand posts per month, accounting for over 100,000+ visits on my aggregator blogs.

What tools are on the market to automatically convert RSS feeds to Twitter, and which is the best? An overview.

Twitterfeed

My aggregator blogs collect the latest articles from over 1,000 different special interest sites, be it nonprofit blogs, aidworker blogs, social media sites or humanitarian news sites. These sites aggregate 20,000+ articles per month, so it would be a full-time job if I’d to tweet these posts manually. No, I use an RSS-to-Twitter tool to make my life easy. Up to recently, I used Twitterfeed which takes the RSS feed from my blogs and converts the feed items into tweets automatically. For each site, I tweet a maximum of 5 updates every half an hour.

Twitterfeed did its job pretty well, feeding not only to Twitter, but also to Identi.ca, Facebook,… It is highly configurable to include or exclude RSS posts based on keywords in the title. Twitterfeed can add words before or after the post title and uses different URL shorteners, including “the king of short”, bit.ly.

Twitterfeed: Feed configuration screen

Mario, the guy behind Twitterfeed, did a pretty good job in providing support via both Twitter and GetSatisfaction. What started  small, grew into a machine with 700,000 feeds publishing millions of posts a day. Back in May, Betaworks and TAG invested in Twitterfeed, and the service went from a side project to a company. They kicked off a major overhaul of the site both in terms of backend systems and look-and-feel.

Unfortunately, migrations are migraines, and Twitterfeed’s uptime started to become erratic. Feeds would no longer feed, or feed tweets ad hoc. To top it off, the website used to configure feeds became extremely slow. Users pulled out their hair, me included.

RSS2Twitter

Looking for alternatives, I stumbled upon RSS2Twitter, which up to today still runs in beta. RSS2Twitter has a clean and simple user interface, allowing users to easily combine input feeds with different Twitter accounts. The drawback is the lack of different features which made Twitterfeed so succesful.

RSS2Twitter: simple but barebones

While you could prefix and suffix your tweets, and filter RSS items based on keywords, it could only feed into Twitter and no other microblogs or social media. It used its own URL shortener, url4.eu, so you could not take advantage of aggregated shortener’s statistics which bit.ly gave. I admit though: RSS2Twitter’s built-in statistics are better than bit.ly’s, and more geared to a “Twitter user”.

So I gave it a shot. When my feeds on Twitterfeed went down for a couple of days, I migrated my most prominent feeds onto RSS2Twitter. And it worked. It worked until… it stopped working.. Or should I say, until it worked too much: On one fine day, at each update interval – 30 minutes in my case -, all feed items would be tweeted, and not the 3 to 5 I wanted tweeted per update.

This happened, of course, during a few days where I was really busy at work, and not monitoring what Twitter activity I generated. Soon my Twitter-followers were complaining about the excessive posting. Sure enough, nobody wants to get 20 to 30 tweets every half hour, many of them repeats. RSS2Twitter support folks admitted this was a problem,  but it took for ages to solve. Good enough for me to disengage.

Dlvr.it

Just around the time of the RSS2Twitter debacle, Twitterfeed came back up, so I reactivated my feeds on my good old trusted service. Until the hiccups from about a week ago, that is. Feeds randomly stopped, the user interface changed, making it impossible to properly configure different feeds. Worse of all it took over three minutes to load the login screen. Once I clocked 15 minutes just to log in.
Today Mario apologized for the hiccups, explaining they are once again migrating the database and backend systems, but unfortunately, users are not very patient.

And that includes me. I tweeted “Does anyone know an alternative to Twitterfeed?” and sure enough, out of the blue, a reply came “Try us. We are in private beta. dlvr.it”. So I registered to be included in the beta test for dlvr.it and have been using it for a week now (check at the bottom of this post if you are interested in participating in their beta too).

I like dlvr.it… It is reliable and highly configurable. It lets you easily combine different inputs and outputs, just like RSS2Twitter while it has just as many features as Twitterfeed.

dlvr.it: combines the best of RSS2Twitter and Twitterfeed

An additional feature, particularly useful for sites which get many updates per hour like my aggregation sites: they let you send tweets every 15 minutes. Twitterfeed and RSS2Twitter are limited to one update per 30 minutes. Unfortunately, for the moment they only feed to Twitter, and use their own shortening service converting all links to “dlvr.it” shorturls.
They do provide interesting statistics, which will keep you busy analysing your tweets to your heart’s content.

Hootsuite

One RSS-to-Twitter service I have not played with yet, is Hootsuite, and online Twitter management tool which just won Mashable’s Open Web Award for best Twitter application.

The definitive plus is the seemless integration of the RSS-to-Twitter functionality within its multi-account Twitter tool, so you “have it all” in one package. The RSS-to-Twitter features are rather meager: while for each RSS, you can define which of one or many Twitter accounts you want to feed into, you can only feed once per hour at max. You can prefix, but not suffix a tweet, and there are no filters available. Hootsuite only uses the ow.ly URLshortener.

Hootsuite integrates RSS-to-Twitter functionality in its Twitter tool

Google and Feedburner, tackling the market once more?

And then, two days ago content hogger Google announced they were entering both the URLshorteners and the RSS-to-Twitter market. “Two birds with one stone”, they must have thought. Feedburner, bought by Google for 100 million two years ago, now lets you feed the RSS feeds “burned” by their service onto Twitter. And they made it simple: Just go to your Feedburner’s feed configuration menu, click on the “Publicize” tab, select “Socialize” and off you go.

Feedburner makes it easy to tweet your feed

Feedburner, being “king of feeds” since ages, knows its business, so no surprise they included features not to be found in the other RSS-to-Twitter engines. They allow the automatic generation of hashtags, based on the categories tags you use for your posts. The updates onto Twitter don’t work on a fix interval, but your post is tweeted the moment Feedburner sees it in your feed. By default, Feedburner updates your feed every 30 minutes, but if your blog or website is configured to ping Feedburner automatically, then once a new post is published Feedburner will immediate pull in your updated feed and tweet the post. Neat!

While they were at it, they also convert all links to their newly introduced URL shortening service, “goo.gl”. It does not seem they provide any statistics at the moment, but it is easy to imagine the integration with Google Analytics, the “king of webstats”, is just around the corner.

While bit.ly, which only recently conquered the #1 place in the URLshorteners business, is putting up a nice fight to counter goo.gl, it might very well be that with its vast data infrastructure and know-how, Google will work all other RSS-to-Twitter services out of the market.

Time will tell, but one thing is for sure: whoever shows the most features, the highest speed and uptime, as well as the best integration, will win. Let the battle for URLshorteners and RSS-to-Twitter services begin.

Update:
The dlvr.it service is currently in “private beta”. You need to register for an invitation. After this post was published, the kind folks at dlvr.it gave us 10 invitations for our readers.
If you are interested in an invite, leave a comment on this post, or email me. Will send you the invite code.
No strings attached, though feedback during the beta tests are highly appreciated by the dlvr.it crowd!

One of the great many things one can use Twitter for, is to share pictures “on-the-fly” with your social community: From about anywhere in the world, I can take a picture with my mobile phone and within seconds post it on Twitter, for all my followers to see.

The most popular picture-posting tool is Twitpic. This free Twitter utility converts pictures Emailed from your mobile phone into a post. Each time a new picture is posted, a link to it is automatically tweeted from your Twitter account.

I started using Twitpic about a year ago, and in the mean time, racked up about 300 pictures on my Twitpic account. Each of them had between 30 and 50 viewers. Some pictures were funny, informative, sweet, frustrating or inspiring. Some are taken from the mountains, at sea level or while boarding a plane…

I should say, it became pretty addictive, but in a good way. I started to be more attentfull for the beauty around me. At first, because I looked for something to Twitpic, later on, I started to feel more open to the beauty and uniqueness of every little thing around me.

"Twitpic" screenshot

Anyway… enough spiritual stuff. Back to the technical part! I liked Twitpic. It was for free, but went down from time to time. I wondered if I would be able to make a tool like this, using off-the-shelf blog software, and using my own domain name.

While making my series “How to select your blog platform”, I stumbled upon Posterous. Similar to Tumblr, it is not a full blown blogplatform like Blogger, Wordpress or Typepad. Nor is it a microblogging service like Twitter or Identi.ca. No, I would call Posterous a “mini-blog platform”: just like Tumblr, it allows you to easily post and share your post amongst other users. The niche Posterous fills is that it automates sharing your content amongst other social media services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Blogger, Wordpress, Xanga and… Twitter.

Unlike Twitpic, Posterous is a blogging platform, so it allows me to customize the look and feel of “my” blog, but also allows me to use my own domain. So I thought: “How about using Posterous as an alternative for Twitpic?”…. And it works like a charm:

"Shot from the Hip" screenshot

Here is how to configure Posterous for the same functionality as Twitpic:

1. Register as a new user. Give your Posterous blog a name like “alter_ego.posterous.com”, and (important!) register it with the email address you will be Emailing your pictures from.

2. Next, add an “autopost” service to which each Posterous blogpost will be published the moment it comes online. In my case, I configured my Twitter account as an autopost option:

3. Take a picture from your mobile, email it as an attachment to “post@posterous.com”.

Emailing the picture from my iPhone

The subject line will become your blogpost’s title:

This is how the post looks like on Posterous

Posterous will automatically tweet the post’s title with the URL (using the “post.ly” URL shortener):

...and this is how the post looks like on Twitter

With some CSS style customization and adding my domain on my Posterous blog, my end-result is this: “Shot from the Hip”, my own Twitpic-like Posterous blog…

Selfhosting a blog is like building your own house

In a previous post I touched on the subject of selfhosting in a series about selecting the blog platform suited for your needs. The subject is important enough to elaborate a bit more.

When you start a blog, you have the choice of either using your blogservice to host your blog, or to rent server space yourself. Of the popular blog softwares, WordPress.org and Movable Type allow you to use your own server. Others, WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger and Typepad don’t give you that option, and will run your blog on their servers.

Intuitively, organisations, and the more “independent minded” bloggers would be inclined to choose for selfhosting, but the choice often is made uninformed. Let me share some of my personal experiences.

For the past two years, I used blogs hosted by WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr. In my experience, their services are reliable, fast, trouble-free, and allowed me to concentrate on writing, on blogging (apart from an occasional hiccup where Blogger thought my blog was spamming). And above all, their hosting is free, offering unlimited disk space for blogposts and unlimited bandwidth. I thought it was a natural progression to move to self-hosting but gradually I started to discover the differences.

I am a blogger, not a hosting expert

When you decide to selfhost, the choice of a hosting service is just as critical as the choice of your blogging platform. There are plenty of cheap hosting services around. Little did I know. I had good experiences with GoDaddy for my domain hosting, so I went with them for my server hosting. But, aaah, I had choices to make..:

• Linux or Windows hosting..? Beh.. Went with Linux. Don’t like Windows anyway.
• Which type of service? Economy (10 Gb space, 300 Gb bandwidth per year, at $4.74/month), Deluxe (150 Gb space, 1,500 Gb bandwidth at $6.64/month) or unlimited (at $14.24/month)? Beh, went with the economy plan.
• What I did not realize is that these prices are for a shared virtual server. Meaning you are using the same server with hundreds of other hosting users, and the load on the server depends what those users do. If you want your own virtual server, prices go from $26.99/month to $105.44/month (10 Gb disk space/500 Gb bandwidth to 50 Gb/2,000 Gb). Quite steep. And then you can also have your own physical server with prices up to $383.92/month..
• In my experience, for about 9 different selfhosted sites, I hit the jackpot: performance on a shared virtual server was good. Only one of my sites was clearly slower than the others, and showed a significant decrease in performance during the US office hours. Several emails and calls to the support centre did not resolve this issue. I am pretty much stuck.

So what is the best hosting service? I would have to ask the experts, but it looks like the opinions are largely divided, if not really subjective.

I am a blogger, not a system expert

If you select a hosting service, check if they offer an easy install package for your blogsoftware. I know blogs. I know my way around HTML and CSS enough to make a blog look nice. But God forgive, I am not a systems expert. Neither am I a programmer. I don’t know my way around the backend systems (PHP and MySQL for Wordpress). Even if it is not rocket science to install blogsoftware from scratch, I would really like to concentrate on blogging, and not hacking my way around MySQL databases, wouldn’t you?

Even as GoDaddy offers a ‘one click install’ for WordPress, there are still quicks, I guess you find with other hosting services too. After I removed a WordPress site from one of my servers, I found out that the SQL database was deleted, but the files were not. I found the problems and the solutions, but wouldn’t I rather spend that time actually writing blogs? You bet!

So when you choose a hosting service, make sure they have a control panel where you can install your blog software with one click. If not, you will have to do a lot of stuff manually, with mistakes easily being made. In that case, start reading “MySQL and PHP for Dummies” !

Building: Do-it-yourself

After you installed your blog software, the real work starts. Just as with blogs hosted by the blogplatform, you will have to choose a theme, or layout template. By itself, that is easy enough, BUT you have much more choices. And choices are curses. Which template to choose?

Most people make their choice based on the looks of the template, but forget there is more than that. How easy is the SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? How easy can you integrate your scripts for Google Analytics? Can you plug in your meta-data for Google Webmaster and the like? How easy is it to customize your template? How well structured are the style sheets? How easy is it to change the banner picture? How good is the documentation of the theme? Is there support, and a user forum? Are there known issues with popular plug-ins and widgets?

Speaking of which: Widgets… In my case, I used WordPress hosted blogs before, and always cursed the limited choices of widgets they support. Boy, once moving to a selfhosted blog, was I glad with the choices I had. But only for a moment… As “choices are curses” again… Which plug-ins to take? Which work well with the theme, and don’t conflict with others? Support? User forums? Documentation?

Even after you installed it all, you might find things are pretty slow. On blogs hosted by popular blogplatforms, all issues related to performance are taken care of by the host. Using selfhosting, you have to do it all yourself. That includes caching to optimize the blog’s loading speed, and keeping an eye on your hosting service’s performance.

Maintenance: Do-it-yourself

There are people who enjoy building their house themselves, or refurbishing it by hand. They enjoy fiddling around in the weekends repairing broken pipes, repainting doors and window frames. I am not one of them. Nor do I enjoy the fiddling around with blogsoftware trying to solve one problem or the other, which is unrelated to the contents of my blog.

A few months I started BlogTips, a new version of WordPress came out with an urgent security patch. I don’t know about you, but upgrading WordPress is not one of my favourite pass-times, even if WordPress makes it as easy as “a click of a button” (Kudos for that!). I first had to check if all my plug-ins and my theme would work. It turned out some were not. The security upgrade was that urgent, I decided to disable the plug-ins I suspected problems with, and to upgrade anyway. Luckily, the upgrade went fine, but boy, I had cold sweat in my hands when I clicked that “Upgrade Now” button.

I can not imagine what trouble I would have to go through if my site did not come up.

On my WordPress blogs, new releases of widgets and plug-ins come out every week. For the 10 widgets I always use on my blogs, I get an average of 5 updates a week. On one hand, this shows the widgets are well maintained, and kept up-to-date, but on the other hand, each time I click on “Upgrade”, I keep a hand on my heart. And my eyes closed. Swift prayers are always at hand, hoping no error messages come up on the screen.

While I only use pretty well supported and popular widgets, there were times where all went haywire and my blog came up all hooble-de-boob. I had to hack my way through to disable the widget, and try to restate all as was before the update.

I can say that for the four selfhosted WordPress blogs I have, I spend at least two hours per week on the maintenance.

Break glass in case of fire

And as a conscientious blogger, you of course back up your blog. Right? Right?!?! Euh… While blogs hosted by your blogplatform, backups are taken care by them, once you go selfhosting, you will have to ensure you distribute the fire extinguishers, and keep them filled with foam: You need to back up your blog, and learn how to restore it, in case of problems.

Luckily, there are some plug-ins that help you with that, but you need to find out which. And learn how to use them.

Concluding

The moment you decide to move away from blogs hosted by your blogplatform, and decide to follow the road sign “Selfhosted blogs”, you will need to keep in mind it is not as easy as a switch. You will have to invest time to choose the right hosting service. You will have to invest time in building your blog with all its widgets and you will have to invest time to maintain it all.

Is it worth it? That is a really subjective matter. I would say, for the serious blogger, with a certain level of technical knowledge and savvy, it is worth to selfhost a blog. If -on the other hand- you can not stand the sight of HTML, CSS, and get a rash by the thought of having to tune a cache plug-in, I would advise you to think twice.

Picture courtesy GoGrid

Sites linking back to your blog’s homepage or to a post, are a measure of success for a blog, as we explained before. It is always interesting to check the backlinks, to see what are others saying about your blog, what has been quoted or commented on.

As you know, you can find backlinks via the Google backlink checker, Google Blog search, and the webmaster utilities from Google, Yahoo and Bing. However these require you to check online regularly. And if you have a few hundred backlinks, it is difficult to pick out the most recent ones.

There is a way to get an automated Email notification when new backlinks become active, using Google Alerts. And it is for free. The only thing you need is a Gmail account, the log-in credentials Google uses for all its services.

Google Alerts is normally used to get automated email alerts about a certain topic, but you can use it for no matter what search criteria. Whatever you enter in the Google search box, you can get Email alerts for.

Alerts are emailed to you once per day, once per week, or as new links come up. You can also indicate if you want Google to search through the web as a whole, or to limit the search for blogs, news, discussion groups or videos.

While normally, in the search box, you would enter subjects like “poverty” or “US foreign policy”, you need to enter a certain syntax for backlinks. Here is how.

Say your site is “ted.com”. Go to Google Alerts, log in, and you will get this screen:

Google Alerts Email search criteria for ted.com

If you want ALL backlinks to your site (and not only those taken into account for your pagerank) then the search item should be:

link:http://www.ted.com

If you want ALL backlinks, fill in:

"www.ted.com" -site:ted.com

Mind the space between ” and -

Select the type (what part of the web you want searched), how often you want to get emails, and your email address and you are done.

Reports look like this.

Have fun!

After reading Part 1 in this series, you will agree with me that selecting the right blog platform, the software you will use to create and maintain your blog, is critical. Which of the four platforms we are considering will it be? WordPress, Tumblr, Typepad – Movable Type or Blogger?

Your right selection will be based on a set of criteria, partially technical, partially functional. In this post, we tackle one issue which is a combination of both: Selfhost or not, that is the question.

“Hosting” is the mechanism to store your blogposts (and eventually also the pictures, videos), and the blog software package.
By “Selfhosting” we mean: you store all data and software on your own server.
“Blog service hosting” is where your blog platform does that for you.

When you start a blog, you have two basic options: Either have the blog service “host” your blog or “selfhost”. This choice will determine which blog platform you can use.

Hosting by your blog service is the easiest and cheapest solution.

Blogger, WordPress.com and Tumblr will host your blog for free, under the “blogspot.com”, “WordPress.com” and “Tumblr.com” domains. Typepad does the same on the “typepad.com domain”, but you will have to pay from US$4.95 (Basic service) to US$89.95 (Business Class) per month.

Starting a new blog with any of them is a breeze and requires no technical knowledge. I have several blogs on Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr and can start a new blog in one minute flat. Typepad is not much different.

Can you use your own domain while using blog service hosting?

By default, Blogger, WordPress.com, Tumblr and Typepad give you your own blog address, which is a sub domain of their main domain e.g. “myorganisation.wordpress.com” or “myorganisation.blogspot.com”. But each of them allows you to map your own domain onto a blog hosted by them.

What’s the big deal about using your own domain name?

Well, it is one of the most important branding tools for your blog. “myorganisation.org” says much more than “myorganisation.blogspot.com”.

If you own your own domain, you can easily map that onto the blog you host at your blog service.
For instance The Road to the Horizon is hosted on Blogger. Its physical address is “theroadtothehorizon.blogspot.com”, but I mapped “www.theroadtothehorizon.org”, my own domain, onto it. This is done in two easy steps: I changed one parameter at my domain host to point to my blog service, and another parameter at Blogger’s side to accept the incoming mapping request.

Once done, all my posts will appeared as part of my domain, and not Blogger’s domain:

Tumblr, Typepad and Blogger allow you to use and map your own domain onto blogs hosted by them, for free. On WordPress.com you will have to pay for the mapping service.

The issue of YOUR stuff on THEIR servers…

When you use the blog service to host your blog, all your posts, templates and gimmicks are stored on THEIR servers. This allows you to concentrate on blogging rather than on upgrading software, backup strategies, server performance, bandwidth etc.. You need literally NO knowledge of servers, UNIX, PHP, MySQL etc..

On the other hand, it also leaves you at the mercy of your blog service. If, for one reason or the other, the service goes down, so does your blog. Particularly with Blogger, users have complained their blog ‘disappeared’ all of a sudden, or was reported as spam and deleted. Blogger is very strict on ‘link harvesting’ blogs (a form of spam-blogs), and when they suspect your blog is a culprit, they give you 20 days to prove it ain’t so. It happened to me (see this post), and I can tell you, I was NOT a happy camper thinking two years of work might just disappear.

Your POSTS might be stored safely on their servers, but what about your PICTURES?

If you choose to have your blog service host your blog, your posts are stored on their servers, but your pictures, videos and other files might not. On most blog services you can only upload certain file types (most of the time, only pictures), and up to a certain limit (a few gigabyte). Even if you do so, it is very difficult to retrieve these files if you would ever choose to migrate your blog onto another service.
Imagine what that would mean for my personal blog, hosted on Blogger, which has over 1,000 posts by now, each with at least one picture…

Just like many bloggers, I looked for an alternative. For a while, I stored my pictures in Flickr, my videos on YouTube and all other files on a public fileserver. All fine and for free, until I discovered quite some countries block access to Flickr and YouTube, leaving big blanks in my blog posts for those readers.

In short, your blog service might host your blog, but not many other files.

Selfhosting: Hosting your own blog

Ask yourself: “How critical is my blog really?” It might look like a rhetoric question for any blogger, and more so for a non-profit organisation that wants to start a blog: “Of course, my blog is important!”, you will answer. But, there are many shades of grey. Up to what level of independence will you to, to ensure your critical blog remains “On Air”.

Some organisations (or even individual bloggers) want to control the uptime, the performance, load speed and the server features. They would not want to run the risk waking up one morning and finding their blog ‘gone’. They also (rightfully) want to store their documents (pictures, videos, PDF files,…) on their own servers, within their own domain.
Selfhosting is the solution here: you install the blogging software and all related backend systems (like PHP and MySQL servers) on your own machines.

There is one more important thing: Self-hosted blogs require you to make a conscious effort to perform regular backups of your blog. In addition, expect to upgrade your self-hosted blog’s software a few times per year to make use of newly implemented features, bug fixes and notorious security holes. Have a look at WordPress.org’s upgrade instructions to give you an idea… Can you handle that?

When you selfhost your blog, you need to pay particular attention to security. Self-hosted blogs are notoriously easier to hack than a Typepad or WordPress.com blog.
Ensure the admin password is secure (and avoid using the admin login name “ADMIN”). Use SFTP rather than FTP to securely transfer files to your hosting service.

Selfhosting: does this mean the machine sits on my LAN?

Actually, few people will run their public website or blog on their own machines within their network. Most prefer to rent a physical or virtual server from specialized hosting services. I use one.com and godaddy.com as hosting services. Cheap, fast and good. (Update July 2010: As time went by, I had to review my opinion about hosting services on GoDaddy. For the worse! And one.com is good as a file repository but definitively not as a blog hosting service). I heard good things about Mediatemple and HostGator too (update July 2010: with which I am experimenting now).

Both Godaddy and Mediatemple have built-in routines to install a range of blog softwares (and other stuff) at the click of a button. At work, one of our blogs runs on Amazon Webservices. They give us a naked (virtual) server and we installed everything from scratch: PHP, MySQL, and the blog software…

Hosting prices vary from a few dollars (my one.com server is about US$2 per month) to a few hundred dollars per month, depending on speed, bandwidth, support and storage capacity.

If you host your blog on your own host, you can also store all documents, pictures, video etc.. on your own domain, without having to involve other storage services (document repositories in technical lingo).

How about internal-only blogs?

If your blog is for internal use within your organisation, you have little choice but to run the server on your LAN. You will have to host your blog on your own physical machine within your firewall to avoid external users accessing your blog.
If that is what you need, you are left in a choice between WordPress.org and Movable Type. Both are available for free download.

Which blog service to chose if you want selfhosting?

The decision to run your blog on your own host, will also pretty much depend on your answers to some of the questions we will tackle in the next parts in this blog series, but if you choose to selfhost, you will have to drop Tumblr, WordPress.com and Typepad as their blogs only run on their servers.

You might drop Blogger too, even though they offer the ability to store your blog on your own host, but the way this is done is rather clumsy and involves FTP (which has its security problems).

So.. your choices are limited: WordPress.org and Movable Type are left if you want to selfhost. On the (much) brighter side: both are amongst the best and most versatile blogging platforms. WordPress.org comes for free, Movable Type is free for developers and individual bloggers and starts at $395 for businesses and $195 for non-profits, which includes one year of free support. But one is far easier to use than the other, as we will see later on in this series.

Concluding:

The blog platforms fall into two categories: those who allow you to selfhost and those who don’t.

If you want to run your blog on your own host – either for internal or external use- WordPress.org and Movable Type are your only choices.

If you want to use blog service hosting then Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad and Tumblr all fall within the criteria. Keep in mind WordPress.com will charge you to map your own domain.

In the next post, we will cover the differences in functionality between these four blogplatforms.

Writing this series, I got significant help from Dave Barnhart, who filled in the blanks on Typepad and Movable Type.
Dave is a social media strategy consultant, founder of Business Blogging Pros, and a gourmet chef. He and his firm have been helping companies use social media since 2005.
He blogs at Business Blogging Pros and Fumbling Foodie. Check out some of the blogs he has created.

A PageRank (PR) is one of the main ways to check a website’s “ranking” amongst its peers. Am I talking Chinese here? “PageRank” is Google’s rating (between PR0 and PR10 on an logarythmic scale) of ‘how valuable’ your site is to the web community (and hereby I shamelessly summarize 234,000 books and 1,234,000 articles written on the subject).

The higher a PageRank, the better, and the higher up your site will feature on a Google search. (and hereby I shamelessly summarize 34,000 books and 2,234,000 articles written on THAT subject)…

While weeding through 200 nonprofit blogs this weekend, I turved the PageRank of each:

Pagerank distribution of the nonprofit blogs

As 200 blogs are a fair representation of the “nonprofit blog market”, this gives you the opportunity to rate your website amongst your peers… You don’t know your PageRank? Use this tool…

Some thoughts are in order here:

• If your blog rates PR0 then either it must be new (Google sometimes takes 2-3 months to rate a new site), changed its domain recently, or there is something really wrong.
• As the scale is logarythmic, the step from PR5 to PR6 is much bigger than from a PR2 to PR3…
• Most of the higher ranked sites (PR7-PR8) are the blogs of large humanitarian organisations.
• In my experience, if you create a blog, post some stuff, and leave it hanging around, the least you should get, is a PR2.
  Post a few blogs per month, and a PR3 will be your rating.
  Network a bit with your blogging community, cross link to other blogs (and back), post a few updates per week, and Google will award you a PR4. Anything higher up requires more serious work. I will write about the basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization in a future post).
• It takes a long time, sometimes 6 to 12 months before a blog gets a PR up to its true value… Google scans all sites several times per day, and keeps track of your blogs “behaviour”. It builds up the “trust” in your site slowly.
  So don’t get discouraged if you are at the lower end of the table. BlogTips, for instance, has a PR3, but it has only been around for three months. I will see it climb slowly over the coming months.

So, how did you score?