If you haven’t started a blog for fear of the time involved in self-hosting, you should know: Choosing NOT to set up your blog all by your lonesome is a valid, viable, and oftentimes smart option. This applies for those blogging personally, professionally, or for their college ministry site.
There’s often an assumption that starting a blog requires an enormous amount of time:
- Time to learn the best blogging platform.
- Time to learn the possible blog design options.
- Time to learn the necessary code to design your blog.
- Time to learn “search engine optimization” so your blog will actually get found.
- Time for trial-and-error, tweak after tweak, perhaps even reading a book or contacting tech support – just so your blog looks normal.
- More time tweaking, in hopes that your blog looks better than normal.
All this – and you haven’t even written a post.
Brian B. asked me to post here about something I sheepishly “admitted” to him as we hung out at Chico State the other day: I don’t do the “self-hosting” thing. That means that I don’t do much “behind the scenes” work on my blog, instead relying on the platform (in my case, WordPress) to do all that for me.
And two years into regular blogging, I’m still quite content with our arrangement.
I started my blog (exploringcollegeministry.com) in July, 2007, three weeks before I left Dallas on a yearlong road trip. Though I’m fairly tech-savvy (when I try to be), I didn’t have time to walk through the steps I listed above. So I went the free-hosting route.
Yes, there are fewer options available to me. But I’ve still got lots of themes and options I can choose from. And when there are “non-negotiables” I want to make sure my blog contains, I make sure I pick a theme that contains those elements. Further, my perfectionism doesn’t have the chance to run rampant – not only can I ignore many elements of “power blogging,” but I don’t even have to take the time to learn how they all work. So I probably enjoy blogging a little bit more.
Sure, I can’t adjust everything I want to adjust. And I recognize that there are lots of good reasons to self-host. But the amount of time I save with everything WordPress does for me – like providing a great basic design and managing search engine optimization – makes free-hosting worth it at this point in my ministry. (I’ve actually used a WordPress-hosted blog for my ebook site, too, as well as a couple of other projects. So yes, I’m a fan.)
If I ever have the time (or staff!) to self-host, maybe I’ll do it. But for now, I’d far rather let the experts handle the behind-the-scenes stuff (for free) – while I tend to blogging daily and taking road trips around the country.
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