If you’re thinking about getting started in blogging, you may know there are several different options about how to put your blog together. There are other different providers for blogs and different types of blogging software you can use, but you have two main choices. You can either use a ready-build blog holding service on the web. This may be something of the hosted version of WordPress. The advantage of this is you can set up your blog very quickly and get running on their server. But you may instead consider hosting a blog for yourself. This means getting your own domain name and service space and loading the blog on there. In this article, I’m going to suggest three reasons why you should always host your own blog rather than using a hosted blog.
First of all, hosting your own blog gives you much more freedom of speech about what you want to write about, and this can be highly appropriate in certain cases. You want to post about a topic that’s interesting to you. You don’t want to be held too far behind a set of guidelines and restrictions that might occur on a hosted blog. Now, you still have to stay within your own servers own codes of conduct, which is likely to be less restrictive than that on a hosted blog. You should also avoid doing anything ethically unmorally questionable. But if you can host your own blog, you have more freedom to talk about what you want and if you occasionally go off topic, because it’s your blog, you have less people to answer to.
The second reason why you should host your own blog is simply for control. It’s always a bad idea to put two much detail about yourself in the hands of other people and too much of your work in the hands of other people. After all, your hosted blog could take your blog down any time, this would mean losing all the hard work and effort you’ve put into it. If you’ve written 50 posts, they’re gone. If you’ve not got a copy of them, then you no longer have access to them. And your hosting service does not need to tell you why they have decided to remove your blog, after all, you’re not paying them anything, you’re probably running on their server, you have no comeback. You really don’t want to lose all the hard work you’ve put into a blog and having to build a new one up from scratch. It’s much better to start off by hosting your own from the beginning.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you wish to host your own blog because you need to be in control of the financial side of it. Any successful blog will make money. This may be in the form of advertising revenue. If you’re using a blog hosting service, you’ll find there likely is advertising on your blog. But if there is, the income from the blog isn’t going to you as it is it’s going to the service to pay for their cost for keeping the blog alive. If you host the blog yourself, you’ll get the advertising revenue for any advertising you pay or place within the page. By hosting your own blog, you’ll have permission affiliate links to offers which make you commission every time they’re sold. You often find that a blog hosting service will not let you put affiliate links in. You’d need to meet their terms and conditions very carefully before doing so. The whole reason for advertising revenue alone is a very highly powerful reason why you should always host your own blog.
If you’re still undecided about whether to host your own blog or not, then you simply may consider the requirements for your blog. If you want to be able to have control of the topics you write about yourself. If you want to always own the content rather than having provided through a third party and if you want to keep any advertising revenue from the site, you really need to host your own blog and there should be no need to question this too far. If you’re solely setting up the blog for advertising purposes or you’re just not technically competent enough for setting it up yourself, you may consider letting a third party host it. Even then, I suggest outsourcing the setup of the blog and continuing to host it yourself. It will be worthwhile in your long term blogging future.