When you are a blogger you have many decision to make in regards to your blog in order to continue to grow and one of those decision may be should I go self-hosted or should I not? When I first launched my blog I started with a free blog because I wasn't sure if it was for me. I had never really gotten into writing before so I wanted to make sure I'd like it before I paid for it because you should never pay tons of money for something if your going to end up abandoing it in three months. I have always wanted to go self-hosted because you have more control of your blog but it's expensive and my audience hasn't grown that much so I didn't Recently WordPress ran a sale for self-hosted website so I was able to try it for a year to see if I like it better than what I was doing before. So far no complaints and I love being self-hosted becuase I can do so much more. In this post I am going to talk about why I chose to try self-hosted and how it can help you improve your readership.

I have control of my blog- When your on the WordPress premium plan you may own your domain but technically you don't own your blog or any of the content but WordPress owns it. Some people don't mind this and like the WordPress premium plan but I never sat well with it because although it's rare that you'll be shut down for no reason at all it can happen because you don't own it. You have more things available to you on the premium plan than you do on the free plan but still your still restricted and don't have complete control. I have never really liked the way my blog looked and have changed the theme a million times but it didn't matter how many times I changed it there was still something I didn't like about. It proably looked fine and was just the perfectionist in me but it still didn't change the fact I hated it and it was stressing me out. I love the looks of my blog because I can customize it more than I was able to before and make it look the way I want. It's also easier to make money off of my blog because now I can monetize more freely and add a donations button if I wanted to help financially support my blog.

I have more security- When you are a blogger one of the things you are constantly thinking about is how can I make my blog more secure and prevent it from getting hacked and be infested with viruses. I am not a technical person and even if I wanted to I couldn't write some code that helps prevent my blog from being hacked or infected with viruses because I don't have that kind of training. The WordPress premium plan automatically comes with basic security but I never trusted that because you never truly know how easily someone can break through it. I would be embarrassed if my blog got hacked and I had to notify my hundreds of subscribers letting them know their information was not safe because I would feel responsible for letting that happen. My blog is more secure now because you can add more security plugins when your self-hosted than you could on the WordPress premium plan. It may technically be possible to hack someone's blog but when there are firewalls and tons of other security features it will be much harder. You can even have a plagiarism plugin that will make it nearly impossible for someone to steal your content and take credit for it which is something all bloggers need.

More storage- I don't post a lot of photos becuase people come to my blog to read what I have to say and I don't think I need tons of photos. I do think you need some because people who have a couple of photos for their posts get more views than those who don't have any. Catchy photos is what attracts readers and gets them to click on your content so I do try to at least have some. On the WordPress premium plan, you give about thirteen GBS of photo storage which sounds like a sizeable amount but for me, it wasn't enough and I was slowly running out of space. The only way to get more space is to delete posts or upgrade them and neither of those options were things I would be willing to consider because deleting too many posts affects your rankings and upgrading was expensive. I held back a lot before I went self-hosted because I had to in order to save space which was stressful because I couldn't do everything I wanted with my blog and was starting to lose interest since I hated it so much. I am glad now that I have two-hundred GBS of storage so I am not nearly as restricted as I was and could do a lot of the things I wanted to.

People often wonder why do bloggers spend so much money to go self-hosted when you can create a free website and it won't cost you any money. Some bloggers who only write occasionally and are doing it for fun may be able to have a free website but this is not a realistic option for everyone. Free blogs don't give you very much space and technically you don't own your content which doesn't sit well with a lot of creators because even if its unlikely to be shutdown it can happen. I started with a free blog but now I couldn't do that even if I wanted to unless I started to delete posts so trying self-hosted was a good option for me. If you just started blogging going self-hosted might not be a good ideas until you learn the ropes of blogging but may in fact be more stressful than anything else. Self-hosted websites are more work because you have more responsitibles than if it wasn't self-hosted so it's not going to be for everyone and some people may not have the time to manage a self-hosted website. It took me year before I decided I wanted to give this a try so don't feel like you need to rush it because some people prefer not being self-hosted. I may not be able to afford this next year since hosting is expensive but that is okay because I can at least enjoy it for a year and it is a goal I can always work towards. Are you self-hosted and what was your experience?