With the advent of business blogs becoming more and more prevalent for businesses, there are many businesses that use blogs, but end up paying an outside source to host the blog.
I know of a company that charges people, literally, per Keyword/Tag (i.e. when you click a keyword on the right side, it finds all blog entries with that keyword in itm more commonly known as Tags). Now, if I decided to go with WordPress, I could have all the keywords/tags I wanted on my blog configuration, and set it up accordingly.
Also, I could use the wealth of knowledge, and thousands/millions of additions available to enhance my blog, without ever paying another red cent.
Say, for instance, you wanted to start a blog. Now, what’s the best solution for that??? This is a decision many people go into uninformed, and they leave with pretty much the same understanding of what they are going to actually get out of the blog itself.
Let’s look at the two main options we have:
1) Local/Owned
2) Remote/Provided
Now, let’s look at each one:
Local/Free:
– You own it, and it’s on your servers, and you can take the content anywhere you want
– You can add or remove modules, plugins, etc whenever you please
– If you choose to cancel it, well then, so be it, there’s no nasty contract to adhere to, because it is yours. As with the hosted blog, you can control all the content, which, I guess, is one thing that is the same.
– Backup/Restore available/on your web host
– No advertisement for the people providing you the blog
– Some hosts even provide you with a free blog, on top of your web hosting package, if you don’t have your own physical servers.
Remote/Hosted/Paid:
– Someone else has ownership of all content
– You still get control of all the content
– It is remotely possible that the hosted blogging company has a better backup setup. (This, however I doubt, since many people use hosting providers like NetSol, and GoDaddy for hosting, which I doubt their backup system remotely rivals)
While I am a strong advocate of business blogging (three companies I work for are currently actively blogging), I fail to grasp the mentality of paying for something one fails to understand.
This is more on the topic/lines of “why pay for something when you can get it for free?” mentality.
There are many benefits I have probably omitted when it comes to each, and any additions to this writing would be greatly appreciated.
I am sure some people that may actually sell blogs as part of/all of their business would have some form of response, and I look forward to hearing from all of you as well.