Rent vs. Own--What Is Your Blog-Building Vision?

The analogy only goes so far, but it really makes sense to me. When it comes to building your blog, do you prefer to rent the digital property for construction, or to own it? Or, in more relevant terms, do you choose a "hosted" solution, or and "installed" one?

Renting, with a hosted solution, is very popular. Renting can be free, such as Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Spaces.Live.com, and numerous others. Or, renting can be for a cost, such as Typepad.com. But the distinction is that someone else owns the digital real estate. In essence, it's their address, not yours. All of your possessions, your site files, are in your landlord's possession.

Owning, with an installed solution, is also very popular. It means that you go out and "buy" your own digital real estate on which to build your blog. You buy some server space, you build your blog, and you control it all (OK, I know, you don't really buy the real estate if it's a shared hosting plan, but you still have control.) It's your address, and your alone. All of your possessions, your site files, are in your control.

I've built both kinds of blogs, and both are good. You can "live in" any blog, but what is the advantage to either renting or owning? I have some philosophic thoughts about it, and I'm sure others more technical than I can provide more pragmatic insights. What do you think?

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Permalink Reply by Joel Friedlander on April 8, 2010 at 10:55am

Clay, for what it's worth, I never considered the "rent" option although I've recommended it to other startup bloggers. I think it's okay to rent if you're not sure whether or not you really want to be a blogger, or maintain a blog regularly.

If you're committed to having a blog presence over a long term, the "buy" option seems better to me. Remember that when you "rent" a lot of control of your blog is out of your hands, and you can be suspended, or kicked for apparent violations of your "landlord's" policies. Hosting is so inexpensive now that it's really not that big a factor. On Bluehost.com I'm paying $7 or $8 a month, and they host unlimited domains all for the same price, so the three sites I have set up are less than $3 month each.

Permalink Reply by Gary Roberts on April 9, 2010 at 1:04am

Wellll... I use Typepad for my blog and pay for hosting through Webdynamic LLC for the sites. I use Freeway Pro for all the site management, which means I own them lock, stock and byte. Typepad offers an array of features and services that greatly reduce the time it would take for me to post, update, add features, etc.

I get to blog, not code. On the websites, Freeway Pro does most of the work for me, but I still put in some considerable time in the development and design side. Typepad, owned by Six Apart (which owns Wordpress and a bunch of other beings) is as stable as I can see. If they ever went bellyup, I would just start again.

Gary

Permalink Reply by Clay Clarkson on April 8, 2010 at 10:18pm

We're on the same page. I've just moved to BlueHost myself. I've seen lots of really good blogs that use Blogger.com or Wordpress.com, but there's just something about being one more subdomain of some enormous digital collective community that just doesn't work for me. Maybe it's my "free market" mentality, or else my nonconformist individualist personality, but I want my blog to be mine, not just absorbed by the Borg of blogdom. It's coded somehow in my DNA that I simply will not launch a blog unless it will have its own unique and memorable .com domain. And if I own a great domain, it seems an awful waste of a perfectly good domain not to go ahead and give it its own piece of digital real estate. That small monthly investment buys not only a huge increase in flexibility of design and features, but the satisfaction that my blog is all mine.

Permalink Reply by Clay Clarkson on April 9, 2010 at 5:26pm

Hey Gary,

Thanks for chiming in with some good thoughts. It's nice to have someone new discussing here. Are you the Mac guy? I'm the lone Windows guy in a family of five Macs, although I use a leftover MacBook for recording music now, and might try it for dual boot.

I put my wife's blog (ITakeJoy.com) on Typepad a while back, but she wants to move to WordPress. SixApart is a good outfit (I think you meant to say they own MoveableType, not WordPress, which nobody owns), and I've known some really nice Typepad sites. However, my experience having worked with both is WordPress is much more flexible, and because it is open source, there is a huge development community always creating new themes, plugins, and widgets. My non-tech 25yo daughter did not like TypePad and switched to WordPress, downloaded some themes, and loaded her new sites on BlueHost.com (ThoroughlyAlive.com, Storyformed.com). I was impressed. My senior mind is not quite that quick.

For our ministry, we're using WordPress both as a CMS site (Home page with pages), and for our basic blog sites. The advantage to that is we all use the same CMS now on everything (about eight sites between the three of us), so we can help each other. We also have robust SEO based on a top level domain. I realize we could map the domain in TypePad, or any hosted blogsite, but I'm told SEO works better with a TLD on its own server. I think blogs have moved away from being parts of blogging communities, and are now right up there with full websites. That's how I think about any of the blogs we plan to launch.

Permalink Reply by Gary Roberts on April 9, 2010 at 10:48pm

Clay... Both my wife and I are on Mac's. Plus there are a half dozen old models scattered around either in use or waiting to be donated somewhere. I even have an old Color Classic in storage next to a 1918 Underwood. Dual boot is useful for some things, but mostly too bothersome if you have another Windows machine. I use Bootcamp when I have to work on files in both systems as it's easier to transfer large files back and forth.

Yes, I meant MovableType. At the last library I worked at we were moving all the engineers websites over to a MovableType system. But then, we had a full time programmer just to handle that switch. I've thought about moving to Wordpress at some point, but that would mean messing with tons of links-in from other sites and blogs, something I'm loathe to do. All the exposure and branding I've created over the years would be quite confused by a switch at this point.

Lately I've been reformating some of my websites to resemble blogs, particularly in the column arrangements. It's getting to the point where many people don't realize they are moving from my primary blog, to the primary website, to the shop and back again.