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

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?

1. Your site statistics

Google Analytics is your main partner here. You will want the number of your visitors to go up, as your blog gets its place in the blogosphere. To get a good overview, select a large period, e.g. a year, as the statistics period, and click on either the  ‘week’ or ‘month’ icon. If you see a graph like this, then you are good:

Visitors per month going gradually up. A good sign.

Your visitors per month keep on growing steadily. You might, as in this graph, see some peaks for “hit posts” you wrote, but these are just ‘hits of the day’. The main body of the graph should steadily go up.

For the same period, look at the amount of new visitors versus returning visitors. You are aiming at the highest possible “returning visitors”.
If you are pretty active in social bookmarking sites, you will see loads of new visitors, of which the majority will not return. In that case, I would say if your returning visitors are above 15% of your total, you are doing fine.
If you don’t promote your site on any social bookmarking sites, your returning visitors should be significantly higher. And you will want to have them grow.

Another significant measure is your “bounce rate”, amount of people leaving your site after the first page they read. You will want to keep them as low as possible. Once more, if you have a lot of new visitors, rather than returning visitors, chances are your bounce rate will be high. Aim for something like 85%. This means you are seducing 15% of your readers to read more than one page.
If you are more active on social sites, your bounce rate will be higher.

The last significant parameter is “pages per visit”. You would this figure to be high, and to go up, as it shows your site is “inviting” and “interesting” enough for people to browse through it. Over time, an average of 2 pages per visit or higher is a good average.

Read also this series on “understanding your blog traffic” to get a clearer view on which statistics parameters are important to keep an eye on.

2. Your pagerank

In short, your Google PageRank (PR) is a a rating (between PR0 and PR10 on an logarithmic scale) of ‘how valuable’ your site is to the web community. The higher a PageRank, the better and the higher up your site will feature on a Google search. If you don’t know what your PageRank is, try this tool.
In a previous post, I did a survey of 200 nonprofit blogs, and mapped out their PageRank, so you can see where you are in the NonProfit blogosphere.

However, don’t get desillusioned. Of the 200 blogs I surveyed, there were some serious heavy hitters, so you might end up rather low amongst your peers. So let me put this in context for a moment:

First of all, your blog has to be active for a couple of months, before it is pageranked. And often you will start at the lower end. If your blog has been around for a year, though, your PageRank should be stable and related to “what you deserve”.
I have several blogs. Some of them I only created for tests and never touched again. They are pageranked  PR2. Some I use to publish one book and never update them again. They typically get a PR3. Some I occasionally post something, and they get a PR4. One, my personal blog, I am very active on. I do a good deal of promotion through social media, and stretch it as far as I can, for a personal blog. It has a PR6.

So I would conclude: if your blog has a PageRank of 4 you are kinda ok. If you are at 6 or higher, you can tap yourself on the back.

3. Backlinks

While visitors and pageranking are core figures, let’s have a look at some fun (for geeks, I admit) detailed figures to see how well your blog is doing.

In the links below, I will use my own blog as measure. Click on the link and put your own URL in the search box to see your ’score’.

• Google backlink checker checks all mentions of your blog on the Internet.
• Even more relevant are the Google backlinks counted for pageranking
• You can also do a Google Blog search to see how many times your blog has been linked to by other blogs.
• If you followed my advice in this post, and subscribed to the webmaster utilities from Google, Yahoo and Bing, you will find more detailed link statistics.

Not only are these backlinks important for your Google Pagerank, but while checking them, you will see who else is blogging about you (well, about your blog), or mentioning your site. So, the higher, the better you blog is performing.

4. Some all-in-one tools

There are two free web-based tools I use to track the performance of my blogs. They give you an overall performance figure based on a series of statistics.

• WebSiteGrader takes into account your backlinks, your Technorati and Alexa ratings. My top blog hits 99.5%, which means it it is in the top 0.5% of all blogs rated. How is yours coming out?
• Try Trifecta for another “all-in-one” rating tool. My main PR6 blog hits 40%. So that is a good measure

5. Keeping track of your blog performance

It is not only important to have a high rating, or to have many backlinks, but also to improve over time. I keep track of all figures in a spreadsheet (I know, I am a fanatic). I run all statistics once every two weeks, note them down and chart them in a graph.
This way, I get an overview of how my blog is doing. It is also an internal stimulus to pick up if things are slacking (and yes, I am competitive).

However…

But with all of those figures whizzing around your head, don’t loose track of your main focus: blogging is supposed to be fun, witty, creative. Blogging for a nonprofit cause is all about advocacy, getting a message out, trying to do better in the world. And no figure in the universe should take that fun away!

Picture courtesy AllPosters.com

OK, you did it, you created a new blog! You post a few entries on which you sweat for days, give it the best of your best. But what’s next?

Here are five basic steps I follow for every new blog I create:

1. Track your visitors.
Nothing is as encouraging for a blogger, as to see the amount of visitors going up, but also to explore where your traffic is coming from, which of your blogposts are the most popular,… So the first thing you need to do, is to monitor your traffic.
Activate Google Analytics on your blog. It is a free tool, and easy to use.

2. Submit your blog to search engines.
Search engines are one of the main sources of traffic, so submit your blog to Google, Yahoo and to the new kid on the block: Bing.
But there are more search engines than just these two giants. Use some of the free services, such as SubmitExpress to submit your blog to a dozen engines in one go.
And be patient. It will take a couple of days before they will start crawling your blog.

3. Sign up for some basic webmaster tools.
Google Webmasters allows you to tweak the Google crawler (the website indexer), to monitor how the crawler sees your site, who links back to your blog,…
If you followed step 2, you will have submitted your site already to Yahoo SiteExplorer, which offers features comparable to Google Webmasters.
And you can just as well submit your site to Bing Webmaster Center.

4. Submit your site to blog directories and social bookmarking sites.
Listing your site in directories will make it easier for others to find you precious blog, giving it the deserved attention.
The most popular blog directories are Technorati and Alexa. Try also the DMOZ open directory, even though your blog will be queued for the approval by an editor, which can take ages.

As an option, you can also submit your blog to a series of “blog catalogs”. Here is the list of free blog catalogs I use for my personal blog.
Some catalogs will require you to ‘link back’, i.e. include a link to their website from your blog.

Blogging is all about creating communities, and being active in these communities. Register, submit your most relevant blogposts and start looking for bloggers with similar interests on social bookmarking sites. The most popular ones are: Mister Wong, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Mixx, Reddit, Furl and Diigo.

If you have time, it also worth snooping around on blog forums. I like the friendly and helpful crowd on the Bloggeries forum.

5. Implement some the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) basics.
If you are really thorough, it is worth to tweak the Search Engine Optimization or SEO for your blog.

A well-tuned SEO will increase the probability people will find your blog through search engines, when searching for topics you blog about.
Wordpress has the superb All-in-One-SEO plug-in, but for Blogger, you will need to manually edit the template:
Insert the following in your template, just before the </head> tag:

<META CONTENT='keyword1, keyword2, keyword3' NAME='Keywords'/>
<META CONTENT='Describe here what your blog is about' NAME='Description'/>
<META CONTENT='Fill in your name here' NAME='Author'/>

…where ‘keyword1,…’ are the most important search keywords for your blog, e.g.: ‘Agriculture, development, poverty, agroresearch’.

And now… your blog is ready to go!

Check also 10 Free Blogging Tools I use daily.

OK, the decision is made in your non-profit organisation: the powers-to-be have given you the green light to start a blog. Or you made up your mind and you will start blogging no matter what anyone says.

1. Either think about it or just do it.

There are two schools of thought: “Jump” or “Think and then jump”. That is an easy choice. Or not?

You can not blog about everything under the sky. Somewhere, you have to define your topic as the starting point. The art is not to be too restrictive, but also not too broad. Broad topic blogs are not very successful in creating a loyal readership. Too specific topic might lack a critical mass of those interested in it.

A real life example: My very first blog I started as an eBook: I wanted to publish the stories I had written over the year. After a while, I thought to also integrate random rumbles of things that happened in my everyday’s life, which in fact, are also small stories. Then I added comments on news articles I found interesting. Later, I added several features just as ‘Pictures of the Day’ and ‘Links of the Week’. I followed suggestions of readers and checked my web statistics for the kind of posts the public found interesting to choose the direction the blog would follow.

I had an idea to start with, but over the months and years that followed, the blog started to leads its own way. Overall, the topic remained the same: the blog was about the things that crossed my path. About things that interested me: travel, aid work, sailing, adventure.

You might not have that liberty of choice, if you work for an organisation. Somewhere your blog needs to fulfil a role within the overall goals of your organisation. That by itself already focuses the scope of your blog.

Here are some ideas to define this starting point, as a non-profit organisation, a bit better:

2. Project blogs

Each organisation has a multitude of running projects. Let your project staff post their accomplishments, their struggles, their ideas. Let them put up pictures, videos and stories. Remember, you are working on a blog: the quality of the pictures and video does not have to be perfect!

Project blogs are ideal to form a sense of belonging amongst project staff, certainly if they are dispersed in different parts of the world. Even more so, a project blog can create a social community with other people working on similar projects or interested in the topic, from all over the world and any walk of life.

Use that community ask to questions, make reality checks, request input or help. Put up polls and instigate discussions.

Good project blogs can also create a “learn as we go” record-over-time, which later could be poured into a knowledge management “database”…

Examples:
Unity Bridge in Sudan
The CGIAR Knowledge Management Project blog, which is also a great resource for our blog!
AGcommons project

3. Field blogs

If, as a non-profit organisation, you have field staff, or staff who go regularly on field trips, field blogs are a great advocacy tool for your cause.

You can post all the data and statistics you want, nothing goes down better than a good field story. Again, spice it up with pictures and video.

Examples:
Doctors Without Borders
Care International
World Vision International

4. Leadership blogs

Have your organisation’s leaders share their ideas, reflect, pose questions and concerns, either to their staff, donor constituency or like minded. Once again, the power of a blog, and the sphere around blogs will automatically create a sense of belonging, both with the staff and the external public. and model knowledge sharing.

Examples:
Ross Mayfield’s blog (Ross is the Chairman, President & Co-founder of Socialtext, the first wiki company)
A Humane Nation (the blog of Wayne Pacelle, CEO of the Humane Society)

5. Event blogs

Be it for a fundraising event, a conference or an advocacy festival, blogs are an excellent publicity and virtual participation medium. You can use blogs to rally participants (‘heat them up before the event’), or to have people participate remotely.

Think also about “live blogging”: have several people participate in the event as ‘rapporteurs’. They take notes, and post blogs real time.

Example of live blogging during a non-profit event:
the 2009 Rome Sharefair

6. Public Community blogs

As an excellent application of the social dynamism of a blog, public community blogs offer the organisations or community members the platform to invite partners and stakeholders to add their voices to an organization’s work. Participatory governance with a scent of advocacy, it all goes for a non-profit.

Examples:
Kiva Fellows blog
Africa Can End Poverty from the World Bank
Case Foundation Blog

7. Topic blogs

Your non-profit organisation handles topics that many others tackle. We all often fight the same battles. A topic blog is centered around one generic subject, with extensions in different directions be it events, workshops or research. Once again blogs offer the opportunity to reach out and connect to an audience both internal in your organisation and towards the outside world.

Dependent on the topic, you will be surprised where your audience comes from, and the amount of people that work on the same topics as you do.

Example:
Force Migration Blog
Design in Africa
War and Health
Women’s Rights

Whatever topic you choose, though, remember that the essence of blogs is “flexibility”. No matter how well you have thought things out, you will have to adapt and somehow let your blog “show you the way”.

Further reading:
- Knowledge Sharing Toolkit
- My Delicious Nonprofit Blogs list contains hundreds of blogs
- good.alltop.com also features a list of nonprofit blogs
- and so does the The Nonprofit Blogs

Second picture courtesy Cyprien Hiniolwa

1. A blog as an addition to your existing web presence
Have you ever defined the goals for your organisation’s web presence? What do you want to achieve? How do you measure that?

For a typical non-profit, I would assume you want:

• advocacy: interest people for your cause.
  Metrics: amount of visitors, amount of returning visitors, depth of visit (amount of pages they read)
• activism: rally people behind your cause
  Metrics: amount of participants in your online actions
• fundraising: something every non-profit needs
  Metric: amount of funds donated via the website, or how many of your donors got to know your organisation via your site. How many use your website as a resource.
• knowledge base: “educate” your audience through a document and research repository
  Metric: amount of documents and amount of readers

Have you also thought about how you want to achieve those goals? Sure enough, part of this is technical. You want a site that is attractive, downloads fast, that has a high use-ability where people can find information easily and quickly.

Most of all the key factor is ‘traffic’ and returning ‘traffic’, visitors and visitor loyalty. Integrating a blog into your corporate website or “connecting” it to your corporate website (with regular links to your site), can drive traffic onto it, helping you achieve your corporate web-goals.

A real life example: An excellent and popular corporate non-profit website I know well has a traffic of about 300,000 visits a month. My personal blogs have a total of about 20,000 visitors a month. If my blogs would be in function of that corporate site, imagine it would increase the organisation’s web presence by 6%. An easy gain!

2. Ease of publishing
Contents can mean a big difference between a blog and a corporate site. As “contents is master” for any web presence, a blog allows you to bring information to your public much faster than a traditional website. And typical blog readers will check their favourite blogs several times a week. Not so for corporate websites.

Typically blogs offer an easy-to-update, easy-to-work-with contents management system (CMS). Once I have written a post, it takes me no time at all to publish a blog.

One time, we did a test between a corporate site and my blog. We wrote an article with a few pictures and a video. It took us several hours before we had the “corporate” article up, and several minutes on the blog.

3. The cost of making and maintaining a blog

Blogs integrate the Content Management and the document repository systems, and offer a wide range of themes or graphical designs. They can structure and restructure your information in many different ways. Blogs make it easy to integrate different functionalities through widgets and other bells and whistles. Adding, changing and repositioning blogs is made easy, using WYSIWYG editors.

Several of my blogs, I brought online in just a few hours. One of our project blogs, I started from scratch in one hour, after dinner. The blog you are currently on, took me (including the domain registration, hosting configuration, installation of the software, definition of the layout and populating it with ten posts), one day. And you can’t say this blog’s layout sucks, can you?

Can this blog’s layout compare with the one from the BBC or CNN? Probably it could… I invested one day of my spare time (and I am NOT an expert), and something like $50 to bring this blog online. BBC and CNN must have spent hundreds of thousands if not millions. How much have YOU spent on your corporate website?

4. Community building
A blog and a ‘normal’ website have another major difference: Blogs offer the ability to build a community, to interact with your readers. Through comments, through out-of-the-box widgets, you get people to interact with you and each other.
Blogs much more than corporate sites, offer the ability to interact with other bloggers either through blog catalogs, social bookmarking sites, cross linking and cross posting, or leaving comments on each others blogs.

Community features are built into any blog platform. And communities are one thing ‘corporate webmasters’ will understand: they bring traffic. And traffic is good.

But there is more to it. Blogs can also build a community within your own organisation. It gives the opportunity for your staff members to bring out their stories, and make them feel part of your organisation’s community. And your readers will love the field stories.

5. A sense of forgiveness and tolerance
Blogs live in a different sphere than corporate websites. Anything published on a corporate site typically goes through a public relations department, and takes time for a webmaster to published. Errors are often taken seriously by those who publish and those who read.
As blogs have grown out of the personal sphere, blogs have more an air of tolerance, of forgiveness.
A text on a corporate site has to be perfect. A picture crystal-clear. Not so on blogs. And even less so on microblogs.

6. In-house blogs
Not all blogs have to be for the general public. You can restrict access to your blogs to in-house use also, running on your intranet. Once again, it will give your staff the ability to bring out their stories, to build the sense of ‘belonging’. And if you are more serious about it all, it allows the sharing of information and experiences.

Further reading:
- Blogging for impact on the ICTKM blog.
- Knowledge Sharing Toolkit
- Blogging: Tips, Traps and Tales
- 22 Ways A Blog Can Rock Your Non-Profit’s Social Media Campaign

Pictures courtesy Ning and RSA Education