Reverse Blogspot Exodus?
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James Joyner | Monday, January 23, 2006 |
Belmont Club is moving back to Blogspot, reversing the trend that most bloggers have followed. One wonders if he will be a pioneer in that regard?
Blogspot is better than it was in the old days and, as I have learned the hard way, sites with huge archives and traffic on the high end strain the capabilities of shared hosting. Sites with huge traffic and revenues like DailyKos, Instapundit, and Michelle Malkin can justify renting private servers at $250 a month and up and sites with under 5000 visitors a day can usually get by with shared hosting for under $15 a month. Those of us in the middle have no great options.
Update: I had a whole string of posts on the Blogspot exodus in my early months of blogging. Some representative posts:
- Server Move (”It’s times like these that I wish I’d stayed on Blogspot.”)
THE AOL OF AOL OF BLOGGING?
No B*S
BLOGSPOT DEFECTORS
FOILING BLOGSPOT
BLOG*SPOT: AOL OF THE BLOGOSPHERE
BLOG*SPOT SUCKS [My 100th post]
SITE UPGRADE
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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I won't say it....I won't say it....I won't say it....I won't say it....I won't say it....I won't say it....
One wonders how he'll import his archives...
Word, most likely.
Blogger has a Word tool that will post word documents. ANd of course importing the pages to Word isn't a big deal.
I started with a Blogger blog on another server. A few months ago, after numerous problems with my host, I looked around for alternatives and ended up moving my main blog to BlogSpot. No regrets. Since I was already using Blogger, conversion was simply a matter of changing settings and a few template links.
Actually, there is something of a middle ground -- specifically in the form of a VPS or Virtual Private Server. A VPS behaves similarly to a full-blown private server, and you have full administrative to your "virtual" server as if it were a private server, however, there are several of these virtual servers on a phyiscal system. This allows you the best of both worlds, and they tend to be relatively inexpensive.
I personally recommend EV1Servers... they have three separate VPS packages. And no, I have no affiliate with EV1 besides having been a customer.
If you have any additional questions about VPS/VPS technology, please feel free to email me.
Jason,
Thanks. Actually, I have been on a VPS since late December, although not with that company. It has had most of the disadvantages of shared servers. We've done a lot of tweaking to keep the processes down, although at a cost of such things as inline trackbacks on the main page.
Blogspot does look like it has improved, and so have all the cms offerings. As a provider of retail hosting, I hope this is not the trend of the future.
As far as being stuck between cheap hosting and expensive, that is truly a frustrating situation.
I do see that you are on WP 2.0 and I know you have oodles of posts and comments. I've found (due to large sites im hosting) that there are some very poor queries in the latest WP that cause some severe resource usage (like getting the last X posts for the main page) when you have lots of content. (So far, I'm not very impressed with 2.0.)
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