Why the Best is Yet to Come With Business Blogs
We are incredibly adamant that business bloggers should host their content on their own servers. Nobody — not Six Apart, not our friends at WordPress, not Blogger — should have control over where or how your content is hosted.
Ultimately, Facebook presents the same problem. Servers crash, stuff happens and your content is locked away inside an extremely limited walled garden.
Facebook is a great tool for online community building, but the long-term future of online communities rests with the ability for bloggers and site owners to link their sites together via a “friend standard.” This is what I meant when I said that the Facebook killer may be the Web itself.
A business blog running on your own domain, on your own servers means that nobody controls your content but you. Facebook holds a lot of promise, but it can’t promise that.
So while we love Facebook and social networks and online community building tools, we’re also still completely gonzo about business blogs, and blogs in general. This is a medium with real staying power.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Lots of smaller businesses do not have the technical resources to run their own servers - not even for their own web sites. So they use a hosting company. Which, by your definition, is unacceptable. Or are you really saying that a company with five employees should be buying servers and hiring someone to run them properly?
Not at all. Companies can get very reasonably priced hosting on shared servers, although those present their own problems. The important thing is that they have direct ownership of the space on which they host their site. They are not bound by terms of service that give the hosting company the right to pull their blogs down for any reason at any time.
I doubt a hosting company who pulled down blogs randomly or for dubious reasons would stay in business very long. Or for that matter a hosting company whose servers are unreliable and crash often. In a market economy companies who underperform or provide bad service rarely last long.
Gotcha. I think that 9 out of 10 times you’re right, it’s the way to go, and it’s what I generally recommend - you can have a WordPress blog on your own hosted domain going for almost nothing.
On the other hand, there are exceptions. For example, I know of one local business here in Houston where the owner keeps her blog on a blogging platform on the Houston Chronicle (the big daily paper) site - it’s free and she winds up getting a lot more readership than she would have had she gone and created something on her own. And, depending on the importance of a blog to your business, that can be a very smart choice.
It also depends on how closely you want to link your business and your blog.
I don’t have too many concerns about terms of service of blog platforms; they are actually quite similar to the TOS you’ll find from hosting companies (if you’re doing something illegal, etc. you’re in trouble and beyond that, most anything goes).
And of course, there are those of us who started on a blog publishing platform some time ago & haven’t had time to move it - not to mention that issue of broken links, technorati ratings, and all that stuff!
Rightly said, your blog should be at your own domain, and free hosting is like a rented house! But at the same time I’d agree with John that many small business concerns may not have technical assistance to maintain.
I see Teresa’s point, however, I have yet to find that makes it CEO-level friendly to do what you suggest, Teresa. All the cool themes are for Wordpress.org with limited ones on Wordpress.com. For most people (who want to blog as hobby as I do) who have day jobs, using hosted solutions makes sense. The great opportunity is to be able to migrate from hosted to hosting your own CEO-level friendly. When this happens, you will, I believe, see mass conversion to hosting your own content.