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Ask YC: Is your blog self-hosted or are you using (Blogger.com|WordPress.com|etc)?
9 points by rob on March 2, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 22 comments
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?

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).




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!


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.


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.


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]


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


Only 200% more to go!


Quite.


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.


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.


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.


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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


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

http://ourdoings.com/index.html


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


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




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