

Ask YC: Is your blog self-hosted or are you using (Blogger.com|WordPress.com|etc)? - rob

I'm just curious, but for those of you who have blogs, do you use a hosted solution like Blogger.com, WordPress.com, TypePad.com, or Tumblr.com, or do you host it yourself either using a pre-made blogging app like WordPress or your own custom app? Whatever the choice, can you explain why you made the choice you did?<p>This question pertains to both individuals who blog and startups who are using their blog to publish their updates/new features to their users. Doing a quick glance at some of the threads here, it seems a lot of personal programming blogs use Blogger.com and company blogs tend to also use hosted services (e.g., Twitter uses Blogger).
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edu
Mine is hosted in blogger but under my own domain. I lose a lot of control
over it, but I save a lot of headaches: no backups, no updates, no security
problems, is hosted in a good reliable network... And all for free. I don't
mind having the top blogger bar.

The only thing is that I'm using disqus for the comments, way better than the
blogger implementation!

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christefano
Self-hosted. The only reason I would ever recommend WordPress.com or Blogger
is if someone needs anonymity for some reason or simply doesn't have time or
know-how to install their own software.

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cstejerean
I went from using self hosted wordpress to using wordpress.com

I didn't like having to always worry if my VPS was up, remembering to always
upgrade to the latest version, etc. Using a hosted solution means giving up
some control but for now it has worked out just fine.

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adarshr
Mine is self hosted without any blogging software. I have written my own PHP
based engine for this.

The reason? Here it is!

Originating works from scratch always thrill me. It evidently demands a lot of
patience and hardwork. But the sense of elation and the thrill that follow are
priceless!

I even boast of this on a page, "100% Original" on my website.
[<http://www.adarshr.com/pages/original>]

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Epicanis
Mine's self-hosted. My personal internet endeavors are small-scale enough that
I have been able to host my own domain services on my own machines for years.
I ALMOST tried to write my own system for running my blog, but in the end I
went with Wordpress, which seems to allow enough homebrew (no pun intended[1])
HTML and the like in my posts to do what I want. Plus, I have just enough of a
grasp of PHP that I think I can set up my own custom extensions when the time
comes and I feel the need.

[1] As a computer-nerd turned microbiologist, one of the topics I expect to
pop up on my blog regularly is homebrewing, from a somewhat nerdier than usual
perspective.

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andr
If it's your company blog, it's a good idea not to host it on your servers,
because if your site goes down you'd lose communication with customers.

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SwellJoe
I've got a self-hosted personal blog running a stock-standard WordPress with
an off-the-shelf theme, and a blog for our Open Source projects running a
relatively heavily customized Wordpress and theme to make it feel more like a
magazine with an article focus rather than a blog with a journal or diary
feel.

Ours is for "eat your own dogfood" purposes...our software installs and
manages Wordpress, among dozens of other applications, and so we like to use
that feature as heavily as possible. So our corporate website runs Joomla and
FlySpray and our Open Source documentation site runs TWiki, all installed and
managed by Virtualmin. Several of our friends and family also have blogs or
other stuff running on the same system running various tools.

If it weren't being managed mostly automatically by tools, we'd probably use a
hosted service for some of that stuff.

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mk
Mine is self-hosted using wordpress.It works, but I am always tempted to write
my own just because I want more control over the app. The templates that use
widgets are nice and wordpress has a lot of nice plugins, but it just isn't
the same. I used blogger a couple years ago and didn't like it much. That
being said I would have to agree with andr that if it was not a personal blog
and my startups blog I would host it elsewhere. You want someplace where you
have some sort of communication with your users about what is going on in the
event of the site going down. Oh I also have a tumblr account but don't really
use it for blogging. I just wanted to check out the features. For the most
part it is pretty cool and I could see where a really nice microblogging
solution could be built off of something similar.

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inklesspen
I use livejournal for some individual stuff, and I'm 90% done writing my own
blogging software in Pylons.

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PieSquared
Only 200% more to go!

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inklesspen
Quite.

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dkokelley
My blog is hosted through blogger.com, but the link is through a subdomain
(blog.example.com) that redirects to it, so it still feels a little more
official, without the risk of having the blog go down if the site does.

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tjr
My personal weblog is on blogs.mit.edu, just because I think that's cool. I
don't have a company blog, but if I ever were to, I would almost certainly
host it myself, to make it as integrated as possible.

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Electro
Self-hosted, but currently down due to Rails problems with the server. So I'm
now considering converting to wordpress -on- a self-hosted server. I'm not
worried about my server going down, there's been more software troubles and
I'm counting about 6 including this one, although technically this is a server
problem.

I'm thinking of slicehost with wordpress. It's an extremely stable blog, but
it's too taxing to keep it up to date on my own rather than using someone
elses free service.

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kalid
Self-hosted: Wordpress on a Rimuhosting VPS that runs betterexplained.com
(blog) and instacalc.com (fun little app).

If you're new it may take longer to figure out, but it's a learning
experience: basic sysadmin skills are very useful, and setting up a blog is a
great way to learn.

Given the amount of customizations I want/need, I need to self host. For a
"get my ideas out there" dumping ground, a hosted service works (I have a few
anonymous blogs for this purpose).

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NoBSWebDesign
We're self-hosted using Mephisto. Why? I like the self-hosted solution because
it feels more professional. And I have more control over theme and plugins (it
looks exactly like the rest of our site). I went with Mephisto for simplicity
(in interface, not installation).

Though, I'm starting to wish I had gone with something more traditional for
the framework, like Wordpress. It has way more support for plugins than
Mephisto.

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hbien
Self-hosted, custom app built with Django. The admin interface was provided by
Django, I just had to make the front-end.

I ended up going the custom route because I really wanted to just hack on my
own website.

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izak30
I use Servee (full disclosure; I developed it) From the start I decided that
disqus was going to be THE way that we were going to do comments; but It's
hardly a blog since RSS isn't implemented yet.

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brlewis
Self-hosted after realizing that I was competing with blogs as much as with
photo-sharing sites.

<http://ourdoings.com/index.html>

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RyanGWU82
Mine's self-hosted. I like the full control that I have over templates,
plugins, etc. I've made quite a few little tweaks and I'm not sure I'd be able
to do that on a site like wordpress.com.

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coglethorpe
I use WordPress software, but the blog itself is on my own server and domain.

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drm237
Seems like a legitimate time to use the new polling feature.

