Why You Should Host Your Own Blog

I have been a very strong and vocal advocate of utilizing different blogging formats and using the blogging format which best suits ones needs.  I admit to being a bit of a WordPress Basher in the past. A friend always advised that once I really got into WordPress more that I would really love it. I must confess that Tami of Aries Graphic Design was indeed correct.

I currently have quite a few blogs and I am familiar with working with pretty much all of the popular blogging formats.  I was very comfortable with my use of Posterous with as my company website, another  Posterous blog used for QR Code Marketing and my Technology, focused blog used on Tumblr. Although I used these blogging formats I made sure I always attached my own domain.  I had a pretty decent following on these blogs with pretty good post views as well.   Ultimately, these formats worked well.  Did you notice that I spoke in the past tense?

Recently Posterous decided to totally change their format from basic and easy to use blogging format to something that they described as Spaces. Umm #FAIL, yes I said it FAIL!!!!!  My big question is Why?  As owners of Posterous, do you wake up one day and think, ” OH wow, my blogging platform is really easy to use, because that’s what I based it on..so let me just screw everything up and make the user interface more difficult to use. ” Did I say FAIL?

Well, this created quite a dilemma for me as I had either try to figure out the ridiculous new interface from Posterous or kick some rocks on the entire platform.  I went with the kick some rocks option and selected to move my blog to wordpress because quite frankly I just didn’t like the direction that Posterous was moving in. This may be fine for some but it just did not fit my needs for what I was using it for. I needed a blogging format not a whatever the hell they were doing format.

Right before this disruption with Posterous I realized that I needed to create a totally new blog that was a comprehensive and ecommerce driven blog on QR Codes. I immediately realized that I needed a blogging format that had more to offer than Posterous and Tumblr so I created a self hosted WordPress site.  The web presence that I was going for really needed a powerful platform and WordPress was it. So through setting up, the hard way mind you, getting my template and adding my plugins I realized the benefits of this powerful format.  Soon after Posterous changed and I fully realized the benefits of having my primary blog self hosted on WordPress.

Due to the changes of Posterous I was almost forced to delve deeper into WordPress.com in addition to WordPress.org. So for me both of these platforms, WordPress hosted and self hosted offered a great deal more flexibility than the new format of Posterous.  So ultimately I learned the hard way the benefits of having control of my own content and going with a more stable blogging format.

Officially jumping on the WordPress Bandwagon.