Pros and Cons of hosting WordPress on your Own Server
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What are the Pros and Cons of hosting a WordPress blog on your Own Server… as opposed to on wordpress.com?
As I have been able to gather… so far…
PROS
1. It is offered free by the web hosting service I use. (If you would like to know which one I use, please email me or read my blog.)
2. I can embed javasript, or anthing I want, into it… and the sidebars… like drmike’s cool poll widget… and SpringWidget’s awesome widgets, etc… and FeedBurner’s SiteStats code…
3. I can customize my own CSS templates — allowing me to replace wordpress’s RSS Feeds with my own Feedburner versions of those feeds… and to automatically add FeedBurner’s very cool FeedFlare items to the bottom of every blog entry… (both of these are very important for creating a subscriber base and creating community around your content)
4. Every incoming link to one of my blog items will count as a link to my own domain, brucewagner.com, with Google… improving the PageRank of brucewagner.com rather than improving the PageRank of wordpress.com (This is very important!)CONS
1. I will have to re-create my entire blog…. Now that I have it just the way I want it! …on wordpress.com
2. My outgoing links will have less importance (weighted power) with Google — since wordpress.com has a high PageRank… and brucewagner.com is not so high (yet : )
3. I will lose the WordPress Community… hits from people looking at system-wide tags.
4. Storage and bandwidth will be limited by, and at the “expense” of, my own hosting account… rather than free and unlimited… on wordpress.com (Although the bandwidth of a blog is very small, and storage and bandwidth is so so cheap on my hosting service.)Please tell me what I am missing on these two lists?
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Bruce
Why are you advertising for godaddy? Are you aware of the many people who have complaints about that company?I clearly recall that when you first came here a month ago that I did point you to wordpress.org. http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=3700&replies=1
As you’ve been here for such a short time I don’t suppose losing the links your blog has earned will be an important factor. But I’m interested in hearing why you are posting this here rather than in your blog because it sounds like blog post to me.
Are you offering to link to the blogs of those who provide you with points to input to this blog post?
(1) Did you know that you can find every post you ever made to the forum and every request you made? That would provide you with data for your pros and cons list. http://wordpress.com/forums/search.php?q=brucewagner
(2) I do recall you asking for a forum with every blog so you can add that to your list above.
(3) I’m not clear if you also asked for a shoutbox for every blog or not but that could be added to your list.
(4) I’m not sure if you asked for a poll for every blog but you could also add that to your list too.That’ll be 4 links that I’ve racked up there, thank you very much.
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I’m not advertising for anything. It’s very relevant to this discussion, and this question is VERY relevant to this forum & community.
I always give credit where credit is due.
The purpose of this is the obvious: The question stated in the Title.
>Are you offering to link to the blogs of those who provide you input to this blog post?
I don’t understand this question. Are you asking me to link to your blog?
Yes, I plan to post this in my blog also. Why? Because I want to get the maximum input to this question. (my blog is here: http://brucewagner.com/blog )
How does finding every post I have ever posted help me gather people’s opinions on this question….?
Do you have something to add to this discussion? Or are you just the skeptic police?
(PS – Timethief, please stop going back and re-editing your comment endlessly. I will not continue going back and re-reading it. If you have a new comment, please add it to the end of this thread. I think that the editing function is intended for correcting typos – not completely changing the content of your comment. Thanks.)
[Post edited – drmike]
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It seems relevant and of interest to a wide variety of people. That said, Bruce, your post does look a little BUY GODADDY NOW!!! USE GODADDY!!! and it might be a good idea to tone it down a bit. I have certainly had my own bad experiences at godaddy, and I’m not alone.
WordPress.org users can use any hosting service they like, free or not, and there are several free web hosting services available, some of them nonprofit community nets. This is not clear from your post.
I think you’ve summed up the pros well, but there are some major cons you’ve not listed.
For one: you’re responsible for your own security. It’s easy to put something in your blog that can break it, or even spyware. I don’t have the sophistication to know what is what, and I’m grateful that WordPress.com essentially takes the question off the table with their limitations.
It’s very easy to make an ugly blog once you start adding stuff to a basic template. One of the reasons WordPress.com blogs look so good is that they’re clean. I’ve seen some real eyerippers of blogs on self-hosted sites.
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Did you check out the Please Read Me First at the head of these forums? :)
A number of your pros are cons and a number of your cons are pros. If you spend any time in the hosting business, you’ll discover that godaddy is very poorly thoght of in the industry. They are regularly seen as a company with little respect to the RFCs that govern how the internet is managed. Many admins have their mail servers blacklisted due to the spam that they send but yet they have policies in place where they are more than willing to take back a domain that gets joejobbed. (Didn’t we just discuss this today?)
Yes, you can add in javascripts and the like to your site hosted elsewhere but a serious question you have to ask yourself is what you’re adding in safe? The thing about wordpress staff is that before any new feature gets added here, it’s going to get bounced around by nine folks who are looking for bugs and places where someone can get access. In addititon both the wordpress code and the wordpress multiuser code is watched over by many. When you do it on your site, it’s just you. Heck, I had one of my own clients hacked this morning due to something she placed on her site. One frigging link in the header to a porn site. We’re still wondering how long that’s been there.
Ditto with the CSS. What happens when you do something that mucks things up? What fall back do you have? (Granted there are CSS sites on the net but again something to think about.)
wp.com has a PR9 and that took just over a year. No offense intended but I think they can live without your inbound links. Now if you wanted to link to my blog with my little old PR6… :)
Cons:
Recreate your own blog – Not really. With the importer/ outputter, you should be able to get all of your data over if you start over with 2.1 over there.
Weight – It’s my understanding that PR is per domain, not IP address. What your weight is currently will be your weight if you move. Granted your old wp.com name helped you out to start with and the tags helped you as well.
Site wide tags – That’s a toss up. My traffic is most on one site because that lists first for teh keyword search within Google and little on another site.
Costs – So are with wp.com. Hosting here for a year with them paying for the domain, custom CSS, and 1 gig of space would be $50 a year. That’s about 4 a month which is inline for discount (read cheap) hoster.
And finally the big thing to think about – Overload. With godaddy, you get a standard account placed on one server. With wp.com, you get the traffic balancing between datacenters. As Matt said once “slashdotting isn’t even a blip on the charts.” Most discount hosters would boot you if you got slashdotted.
Well there’s my take.
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Guys, it’s a legit question. Don’t worry about it. I’m not. :)
I’ve seen some real eyerippers of blogs on self-hosted sites.
I’ve seen some real eyerippers of WordPress multiuser sites as well. A high ranking site within “free blogs” on Google is a very poorly done WPMu install that looks like it hasn’t been touched in ages.
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OT: Why is the formatting all of a sudden messed up? I think Bruce was editing his post and after that things went wonky. Is there an unclosed tag somewhere?
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I don’t see anything messed up in his format on his wordpress blog here http://brucewagner.wordpress.com/
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I saw that as well but it looks like it went back to normal.
Bruce, you may actually want to link to your blog since you mention that you’re also posted this to your blog. :)
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If bruce were to actually link his username to his wordpress.com blog then he would lose the advertising value that comes with linking it to his commercial site as he has done all along. But that’s neither here not there as I’ve provided the link
@brucewagner http://brucewagner.wordpress.com/Importing and exporting wordpress.com blogs on wordpress MU blogging platforms
There is an import and export function for this purpose in your dashboard
-> dashboard -> manage -> export -> wordpress(1) You can export the contents of your blog (posts, comments, categories) in the form of an xml file to your desktop and then import the xml file into the other blog site.
(2) The blogroll links must be separately exported and re-categorized. That means you will have to re-assign them to each link but it’s better than copying and pasting those links yet again. :)
(3) You will need to install the technosailor plug-in on your wordpress.org blog prior to importing the contents of your wordpress.com blog to it. Here’s the link to the plug-in.
(4) Exporting and importing instructions including helpful tips can be found here http://bloggersblurt.wordpress.com/2006/11/02/importing-from-one-wordpresscom-blog-to-another/
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3) Actually no. Not any more. The 2.1 release has it built in. For older 2.0.x builds, you need the upgrade.
Go ahead and assume that this is now built in unless they say that they have the older version. When you go ahead and download it, it’s going to be the 2.1 version. The 2.0’s are buried within the site.
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A side note: I find it slightly humorous that people got so upset when I included a link to godaddy (which I have now removed), …and at the same time… upset when I DID NOT include a link to my blog (which I have now added)… http://brucewagner.com/blog
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I wasn’t upset. Granted I did check for affliate links but I do there all day long around here.
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The formatting is still all messed up for me. And I wasn’t upset either, I just thought it looked very … uh… markety. It reads very cleanly now.
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Another pro I just thought of…
PROS
5. I can integrate a single login ID/password system for my entire site FREE, and integrate my entire site (with joomla.org), and my forum (with simplemachines.org), and my blog (with wordpress.org or s9y.org)Also…
The reason I use the brucewagner.com/blog link everywhere… is that it creates a “permalink”, of sorts. If I do decide to move my blog, that address can remain the same.
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PROS
6. Forums, shout-boxes and polls plug-ins.
7. Email notifications of blog posts can happen with the correct plug-in.
8. Perhaps blogging by email is also a wordpress.org possibility too. -
Just for reference, I edited Bruces post up there where he used li tags and replaced them with blockquote tags. In this case, that was what was causing the layout to go wacky.
I had to go back through and add in ul tags where folks had used li tags on the old layout a few times.
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