How to Launch a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog in 10 Minutes
Most of us got our feet wet with a personal blog on a free platform. But if you are serious about taking your blog from hobby to business, you need readers and search engines to take you seriously. To do that, you need to be self-hosted. What exactly does that mean and how do you go about it?
Why You Need A Self-Hosted Blog
Free platforms, like Blogger, Tumblr, Medium, Weebly and WordPress.comare great if you are a hobby blogger. I started blogging while I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, 5 years ago, on Blogger. They offer little to no overhead, and basic start-up functionality without any HTML or CSS coding. They store everything for you, and can have you up and sharing your content with the world in minutes. For free…
Opportunity Cost
But they aren’t really free. To use their free services, you agree to terms of service. These terms often significantly limit your ability to monetize your content. They either don’t allow ads, or require you to use their ads and keep a cut. They may even put ads on your site for their entire benefit. Consider that you can generate over $100 a month from ads with just 10K-20K pageviews monthly, and the cost of these free services suddenly seems pretty steep.
Branding
You want your URL to be short, sweet and synonymous with your brand. A beautiful blog design starts with the URL. If you want to be taken seriously by readers, search engines, and future potential sponsors, you need a self-hosted blog with a clean URL. You don’t read headline news at nytimes.blogspot.com or shop at gap.tumblr.com.
If you want your blog to be a real business, you have to act like a real business. And real businesses own their content and self-host their sites.
Content Ownership
Those terms of service you agree to for using free services? In some cases, the content you are producing, might not even be yours.
So Google may choose to adapt, reproduce and distribute YOUR content, and if you miss the memo when they decide to terminate your service, you may lose access to all YOUR content. And they can terminate your service if they deem you to have violated their Terms of Service.
Going Self-Hosted
So basically, if you want to monetize your site, have total control of your content, and be taken seriously as a business, you need to have a self-hosted blog. Now that you understand the why, here’s the how.
Comparing Hosting Packages
First, unless you plan to buy and install your own server in your home, you need to choose a host. And there are many to choose from. Hosting is not super expensive, and can be obtained for as little as a few dollars a month. Packages will include storage, bandwidth and service-level. Storage is size of the content you save on the host’s server. Bandwidth is how much traffic is accessing all that content. These two features are fairly standard and directly comparable across hosts and hosting packages.
What is less comparable is service-level. For smaller sites, most hosts will provide shared server space, which is more than sufficient when you are first starting out. However, beware. Many large hosts will throttle your traffic to balance activity on their servers. I started on a large host — and despite only averaging 3–5K monthly pageviews at the time vs. a 25K pageview service — the week I switched, my pageviews doubled and have continued to grow since.
As you get bigger, you likely will want to upgrade to a dedicated server.
Service-level also includes customer service. I switched from my first host after spending 2–3 hours for multiple weeks in row on hold with customer service due to site downtime. You want to spend your time building your business not dealing with technical service issues. My current host — I know her by name, have a direct phone and email to contact her personally, and a Facebook support group.
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