Why go self-hosted?

Part of “Going Self-Hosted with WordPress: A Wolfie Guide” [PDF]

Another question that I’ve been asked in the course of writing this sort-of Guide to self-hosting is why you would want to go self-hosted in the first place, and what skills you need to be able to do it? I touched on this subject in the first post in the series but I’m going to try and go into a little more depth here.

Why go self-hosted?
The biggest reason is freedom. Whichever blogging service you’re currently using, you’ll be using it under their terms of service which will restrict you from doing certain things. For instance, if your blog is at WordPress.com then you can’t:

• Edit your theme, or download and install new ones from the Net
• Change the way your blog works
• Add new features, like a blog search, if your theme doesn’t already support them
• Use Javascript in your widgets, or anywhere else
• Use forms, other than those created by WordPress
• Have Google Adsense or any other form of advertising

If you think that you will ever want to do any of these things, then you need to start thinking about self-hosting.

Another reason for self-hosting is to get some protection for your blog. At the moment, your WordPress.com blog is not really under your control; at any time WordPress could delete it for a Terms of Service violation, without telling you about it first. You may not think this could happen to you, but seeing as the ToS are really quite vague (and one important prohibition is actually in the FAQ and not the ToS) there’s always the possibility that it will even if you didn’t mean to do anything wrong.

Once you go self-hosted, you don’t have to worry about any of this stuff – it all becomes possible and if your experience is anything like mine, you’ll immediately see an increase in readership and visitors to your blog.

If you’re at all interested in the way blogs work underneath, then go self-hosted. You can set-up a test blog in addition to your main one and experiment with everything. If you want to learn CSS, then playing about with your blog’s theme is a good way to see how it all works. If you want to add features like threaded comments, or comment subscription, then self-hosted is the way to go. If you want to add a message board (like this one) to your blog, then self-hosted is definitely for you.

What skills do I need to go self-hosted?
You need to have a certain amount of computer-literacy, but then you’ve probably got that if you’re already running a blog. You’ll need to know that some of what is done for you at WordPress.com, you will have to do yourself. Most of it, though, is not hugely different.

If you use the tips in the first article, then installing the WordPress software is a matter of a few clicks; this will get you up and running. You can then follow the tips in the later articles to add features. The only thing you really need to learn – at least to begin with – is how to successfully use an FTP client. File Transfer Protocol is what takes the files from your local PC and uploads them to the webserver that your site is loaded on. It’s just like transferring files using Explorer – just that one of the folders is on a remote machine. There are various FTP programs you can use – Cyberduck for Mac, CUteFTP and Filezilla for Windows – all of which work basically the same and make the task really easy.

The only other thing that could be a barrier is cost – and with hosting packages starting from as little as $25 (about £12.50) per year there’s really nothing to stop you is there?