Rethinking Hosted Blogs

After the Blogger outage that ended earlier today caused my most recent updates to the look and feel of the blog to be lost, I have to say I'm giving second thought to this whole hosted blog thing. Just a few days ago I was reading about Wordpress.com getting hacked and thinking "there but for the grace of God go I." Apparently, I spoke too soon.

As much as I like the freedom (both creative and financial) of being able to quickly set up and add content to a blog on this site, I'm starting to think the pain isn't worth the gain. And it isn't just about stability. The fact is, as I've seen pointed out elsewhere in the blogosphere, Blogger has other problems. For example, the platform relies heavily on inline styles that make it tougher for Google's bots to efficiently crawl these blogs. This is rich in irony given that Blogger is a Google property. So, when I published my recent article on the Microsoft Office 365 beta, Bing (a Microsoft property) was all over it well before Google ever got a whiff of it.

You can argue the ethics of Bing apparently prioritizing Microsoft content if you like, but if I'm blogging I want to get the best possible exposure on Google I can get, since Google is by far the search engine of choice. By contrast, after doing SEO on a standalone Wordpress site that's hosted on an ISP for a client of mine (a sideline that's in the process of becoming my main business), I got that site on the first page of Google results in no time. All organic. No black hat BS required. So, if I am going to do anything serious as a blogger, maybe this isn't the place to do it.

And please, forget the Huffington Post. Frankly I'm glad I never touched that: 1. because it got a reputation as a liberal cyber rag, deserved or not, that turned off a lot of prospective readers, and 2. because Arianna got $315 million and most of the people who slaved away to provide the content that helped HuffPost succeed got peanuts.

So, here's what I'm thinking today. Blogger or WordPress or whatever may be fine as a blog incubator. You can start for nothing and get the instant gratification of getting your message (whatever it may) be out to whomever you can reach. But if it's worth making a long-term commitment to, it's worth spending anywhere from $80-$120 a year to control it yourself. And if you already have an ISP, the incremental cost is even less. No being tied in to a handful of standard templates with some variations. No limitation on your monetization strategy. (Let's face it, unless you have some coding skills, with Blogger your options are AdSense and Amazon. You don't even get out of the letter "A.)

The bottom line: look for this blog to be elsewhere in the near future.