benefits of hosting and domian?
-
Hi there,
1st please don’t rag on me if this has been posted elsewhere. I didn’t see it or I wouldn’t be posting. I did find some stuff but it didn’t really clarify in my mind what I was looking for so I was hoping someone helpful could respond or point me in the right direction.
I’m just curious…..what are the benefits of self hosting? Aside from what I gather that you can have ad sense (no big deal to me) and you can have more freedom with your layouts. Do you have to purchase a domain name when you self host? And when you have your own domain does that not throw the anonymity out the window as your personal information is public for anyone who feels the need to see who owns said domain?
I really would like to have more freedom with my theme/layout but know nothing about css so it would do me no good to just do the css upgrade. I imagine the only other option would be to self host and have someone design something. Am I wrong or right?
Thank you
-
Upside-you can run javascripts, flash, embed media, have as many ads as your heart desires, total control over the look and feel of your design.
Downside-besides paying for webhosting and the domain (not horribly expensive, really, and you can choose to buy your domain in a way that you can remain anonymous), you get to install, maintain and upgrade the WP software and theme. When (not if) something goes wrong, you’re the one who has to figure out how to fix it. Of course, WordPress.ORG also has a support forum where you can ask questions.
Having been self-hosted, I found that the back end maintenance was taking time away from what I really wanted to do. Moving from self-hosted to WordPress.COM was the right choice for me.
-
I agree with jen. I do have another site (under construction) but I prefer .COM for blogging. There is another upside: the global tag pages. I’m told (although I’ve not seen any) the hits from there can be significant.
On your point about CSS: let me make a suggestion. You can try CSS before you buy it. And that’s pretty much the way I learned CSS. I set up a test blog and did my coding over there. Took me a while but I finally got good enough at it to create my own Sandbox theme. (And I had NO CSS experience a year ago.) So if it is something that interests you and you are willing to invest the time, it can be done. (Plus, there are some folks here in the forums who are willing to help when you get stuck.)
-
thank you for the replies! i really like the option of having javascript capability. i don’t like that i can’t have a sitemeter or statcounter that will identify referral links here. that i can say is probably my only major complaint with wordpress. other than that i really like that it is easy to use just like typepad…only free :) and it has more basic template capabilities than typepad does. i guess i will just play around and see what i can teach myself.
@vivianpaige, can you play with the css on a wordpress test blog or did you do it on another platform? thanks again :)
-
You can play with CSS on any wordpress.com blog. Under Design – Edit CSS. Use the Preview button to see what it looks like. Until you pay money, whatever changes you make won’t be saved to your blog, but the CSS will stay in the editing box and you can keep working at it until the Preview does what you want.
-
-
Re: referral links. I see those in my dashboard so it’s not a problem for me that Sitemeter (which I use) doesn’t show that info.
Re: test blog. Since you can have as many blogs as you want here, I set up a separate blog to do my coding on. (I actually have a second test blog for testing various issues that come up in the forums that folks need help with.)
- The topic ‘benefits of hosting and domian?’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 