Blog Tips

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.

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You created your blog, and write posts, write posts, write posts… Gradually, your audience grows. You get comments, get other bloggers linking to you,… Your blog has a lift-off. But how much of a lift-off? Are you flying in orbit, or are you barely clearing the tree tops? How do you measure your blog’s performance. How do you keep track of it?

Success is in the eye of the beholder

What means “success” to you? Are you writing for a selective public? Then reaching those handful would mean accomplishment for you. Are your goals accomplished having created a small working community around your project blog? Good for you. Or are you already happy just to have a medium where you can post stuff, and can refer to if you get questions about your organisation? Ride on!

But.. if you are a main stream blogger, you will need more than that. You will want more than just a handful of visitors per day. You will want more than one comment per week. What tools are around to keep track of how well you are doing?

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Alright! You recognized your organisation can benefit from a blog and you know what you will blog about. The next step is critical: Choosing your blog platform, the “software” to edit, publish and host your blog.

Choosing the right blog platform is critical. You might set out as “let me give this a decent try”, but once you made your choice, moving from one blog software service to the other is an absolute drag, as we will cover more in depth further down in this post.

Comparing blog platforms

The most popular blogging platforms are:

• Blogger, owned by Google
• The WordPress duo: WordPress.com (hosted by them) and WordPress.org (selfhosted)
• Tumblr
• The Six Apart duo: Typepad (hosted by them) and Movable Type (selfhosted).
  They also offer the lesser known VOX, a free blogging platform.

Each of the blog platforms has specific pro’s and con’s. It is difficult to find a single article covering an unbiased, comprehensive and objective comparison covering all features, ease of use, flexibility, cost, support and technical limitations.

In this series, we have turned it around: We started from you, the non-profit organisation, narrowing down the options you have, based on the 5 most critical questions you need to ask yourself:

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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.

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Part 1 of this series showed how critical it is to choose the blog platform suited for your needs, before you start.
in Part 2, we covered one of the first questions you need to ask yourself: will I selfhost my blog or not?

Today, we’re covering a topic which is just as critical in deciding which blog software to use: “What will you do with your blog?”. Or even better: “What do you want your blog to do for you?”.

Are you OK with a basic functionality, concentrating on posting text, pictures, video? Are simple standard templates and widgets all you want? Or are you looking for more versatile functions?

Let’s go over the different blog platforms we are covering in this series: Tumblr, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type and WordPress.

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