Advantage Of Running Self Hosted Blog

A lot of people who are blogging in the blogspore nowadays usually are using services from blogger.com or wordpress.com. But they do not realise that actually they do not have total freedom to control their own blog.

Usually people think that they can edit the xml(layout of the blog) and add 3rd party widgets in blogger.com is already means they can totally control their own blog. This is not true as you cannot modify the way these plugins behaviour and modify the some of the important thing.

While in wordpress.com, you also have a lot of build in features to use, but you cannot install any custom plugins. You also cannot put advertisements and any java scripts. This has totally restricted you to totally customise your own blog.

Other word, if you are running your blog at these share hosted services, you will have less freedom and there is a lot of restriction.

One of the restriction is you cannot really write some sensitive things such as politics and adult stuff…
Why? Coz when someone complaint, these service provider will either close down your blog or lock your blog and remove the sensitive contents. Usually these happened to politic blogs. One of the example is Tun Dr. Mahathir’s blog which was running on blogger.com before this. Someone reported to blogger.com and make false accusation saying that he is writing sensitive articles which are not the facts(in facts, those articles are written based on real facts). blogger.com immediately locked his blog without further investigation.

So this clearly shown that shared blog services do not give you the freedom of doing what you want.

Usually, people who running their own blog are using the wordpress.org script.
Please do not confuse wordpress.org and wordpress.com.
WordPress.org script is a free and opensource project, so anyone can just download the PHP script and install them into their web hosting and run their own self hosted blog.
While wordpress.com is the shared blog service that run by wordpress.org which is using the same blog program. Some restriction is placed on wordpress.com can be removed by paying certain amount of money. The money is actually for their servers and also development of wordpress.org script.

You might wonder that since it is running on the same program, what makes the different if directly use their service and run it on our own web hosting account?
As I said above, the restriction of contents and plugins install. You are not given the rights to install any plugins you want like self hosted ones, you can only use the widgets that they already provide you. And you are not allowed to put any java scripts. While blogger.com, although you are allowed to put java scripts and 3rd party widgets, but you cannot have total control on these 3rd party widgets.

This is the reason why most of those bloggers who intended to have more control on their blog is running their blog using the wordpress script on their own web hosting account. There is several examples of these blogs like below:
http://www.kenwooi.com
http://www.irenelim.com/fashion/
http://blog.bloggerunited.com/

Running a self hosted wordpress blog seems like something very hard. A lot people is having assumption that it is hard to install plugins and maintain it. This is actually not true. Maybe the setup for the wordpress script itself is hard for most of the people, but installing plugins is not hard at all. You just need to search for the plugins in your wordpress control panel, and click install at the plugins you prefered, it will automatically installed and run by just a click.

Another false assumption where people always concern.
Most people think that you must have a domain name like yourname.com in order to run a self hosted blog. This is totally wrong. You can actually use some free sub domain services like co.cc and use them like a normal domain name. And about the web hosting? You can use free web hosting service for this as well. But of course, free web hosting service will be not as good as paid web hosting. There might be a forced ads at the bottom of the pages, or might be there is limitation of file size. But this is not important as you can always host the pictures and video at some other services like youtube.com and photobucket.com. This will actually save your web hosting bandwidth if you host these files using these services.

If you do not know how to use services like co.cc as your blog URL, you can actually directly use the sub domain name that the free hosting service give you. If using these sub domain names, you actually no need to do or know anything, it is already completed the setup of the sub domain name itself. You just need to setup the wordpress script only.

Anyway, if you need a free web hosting account for your self hosted blog, you can go to http://fik4.com. It comes with a free sub domain name when you register, so you will get a URL like http://yourname.fik4.com for your blog. And if you wonder, yes, this is a blog hosting service sponsored by me. Everyone can get it, just need to go and register, and you will get it.

What is the limitation of my sponsored blog hosting account? It only have 300MB space and 10GB monthly bandwidth. The rest, it is just the same with paid web hosting account. 300MB is more than enough for a new blog, even a lot of blogs that already 3 years old with lots of articles also didn’t fill up 50MB of the database space that is provided yet. Of course, the pictures is hosted at photobucket.com and videos is hosted at youtube.com to save the space. If you are so lucky to be so popular, until the space and bandwidth is not enough, then it will be the time you transfer to paid web hosting. High traffic means you had already earn a lot of money via your blog.
🙂