Attention anyone who has Self hosted: Should I self host?

  • Unknown's avatar
    turtleboysports · Member ·

    My blog gets up to 400,000 page views every month. I have people who want to pay to advertise on my site but can’t because its not a self hosted blog. I’m just looking for some feedback from anyone who has made the transition to self hosting before. What host did you use? What are your added responsibilities now? Do you still have access to analytics such as page views and location of readers worldwide? I’d love to hear any stories your have. Thanks.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    spookycrisp · Member ·

    The big difference is that many things get added to your responsibilities.

    My (poor neglected) site is a WordPress.com site. Mainly because I didn’t want to have to deal with managing spam, firewalls, and it’s easy to use.

    I like some of the info in this article: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/com-or-org/

    It does seem to be geared towards sticking with WordPress.com, but it does lay out the differences between .org/.com. There are also some useful links in the comments.

    Good luck deciding which way to go!

  • Unknown's avatar
    turtleboysports · Member ·

    Thanks spooky crisp. I read that article, and wasn’t sure what this meant:

    “You’re also responsible for performing routine updates and backing up your content.”

    How do you perform a routine update, and what does it mean by backing up content? Do blogs have the potential of disappearing? Can I keep the wordpress.com as a form of backup?

  • Unknown's avatar
    raincoaster · Member ·

    You go to the Plugins page daily and see what needs to be updated. You get a dashboard notification if something does. You click to update and, 9 times out of 10, everything goes well. They suggest that you disable ALL plugins, then update, then re-enable them, but I’ve only once run into a problem and I’m far too lazy to do that.

    Yes, if you don’t update and maintain security you can lose your entire blog. You can keep the WP.com blog as a backup, but it needs to be set a Private otherwise search engines (and staff here) will assume you’re just trying to spam by duplicating content on multiple platforms.

    If I had that kind of traffic I’d have been gone a long time ago. It’s not as hard as it used to be. As long as you have a Cpanel, you can recover from pretty much anything. Just don’t get sloppy about updating and never ever use a free theme, because they’re filled with malware.

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