As someone who is always concerned about saving money–both at home and work (i’m not sure which pushed me over the edge in saving money)–and pinching the dollars until they screech, I was shocked to read Dean Shareski‘s summation of Wes Fryer’s blogging costs:
I can certainly understand your wife questioning a $1200 annual budget for blogging. I still think that’s absurd. There are many bloggers who use blogger with very high traffic, which costs them $0. I agree, I like having my own domain and host but other than the hassle of moving, I sure hope you can find an alternative. Given your trouble of recent months, there has to be a better company out there.
There’s no way I could afford a $1200 bill just for blogging. Even given that Wes has a zillion subscribers to his blog, this is an expense he should not be paying given free tools, as Dean suggests above. I made the same suggestion to Wes via tweet–switch to Blogger–but he didn’t go for it.
However, as I reflect on my own journey to Blogger from Thingamablog, I thought I might share some of my lessons:
- Blogger enables you to focus on the writing and sharing rather than tweaking the blog components, installing the right plug-ins, etc. While you can certainly continue to do that on your own–after all, setup MAMP/XAMPP on your laptop and install WordPress and anything else you want–why do that when you’re focused on blogging? For fun, I do have a WP installation on my home computer…and I backup Blogger there. WP 2.7 has made this process VERY easy, including incremental backups.
- Blogger has made it easy to back-up your work…and will probably continue improving. In a very real way, Wes will always be able to transition his content out of blogger to WP. The only issue is, can Blogger import old content from WP with included audio/video/images? Would Wes have to leave some of his content behind? When I walked away from Thingamablog, I left 7000 blog entries on the table. They’re still published at MGuhlin.net (in fact, they get twice as many hits as the new domain, MGuhlin.org) and I occasionally drop content that gets visitors into the new blogger blog.
- Domain registration is $10 a year. Yep, I’m paying for $10 for the MGuhlin.org domain. It’s a recurring fee but…$10 a year. That beats $90-$100 per month.
- Google Picasaweb provides storage of all my images. I don’t have to rely on Skitch, Flickr, whatever…I can put it all into PicasaWeb and then back it off using the Picasa application. That makes backing up increasingly easy. Cost for approx 11 gigs of extra storage? $20 per year.
I understand what it’s like to walk away from a lot of entries. I don’t know how many Wes has, but I figure he writes more than I do! Still, $1200 per year for blogging…forget about it!
Subscribe to Around the Corner-MGuhlin.net
Be sure to visit the ShareMore! Wiki.
Discover more from Another Think Coming
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Another Think Coming 
And for $4 a month, you can completely lose the features that you’re locked into with a single platform. Granted, I don’t have the high traffic that some other people have, but if you utilizing that kind of bandwidth, you could probably find a sponsor to cover some of your webhost costs. Just a thought.
And for $4 a month, you can completely lose the features that you’re locked into with a single platform. Granted, I don’t have the high traffic that some other people have, but if you utilizing that kind of bandwidth, you could probably find a sponsor to cover some of your webhost costs. Just a thought.
Rick, tell me more about this $4 per month cost and loss of the features. I don’t know who or what that comment is aimed at.Miguel
Rick, tell me more about this $4 per month cost and loss of the features. I don’t know who or what that comment is aimed at.Miguel
I am going to ditch Siteground and move to a new blog host, probably Bluehost, but Ugh…. the hassle and the stress… Since I just paid for another month I may postpone this process till later in January.Rick, in terms of sponsorship, at this point and for the foreseeable future I really want to keep my blog entirely non-commercial. I am not sure what the income would look like if I added google ad-sense, but I really don’t want to go down a commercial road at this point for my blog.I’m interested in what your $4 per month reference is about too.
I am going to ditch Siteground and move to a new blog host, probably Bluehost, but Ugh…. the hassle and the stress… Since I just paid for another month I may postpone this process till later in January.Rick, in terms of sponsorship, at this point and for the foreseeable future I really want to keep my blog entirely non-commercial. I am not sure what the income would look like if I added google ad-sense, but I really don’t want to go down a commercial road at this point for my blog.I’m interested in what your $4 per month reference is about too.
I just remade my blog at blogger (http://drezac.blogspot.com), and I have had this very similar struggle with “to pay or not to pay.” This conversation makes me feel pretty good about staying there. When it all comes down to it, it’s not whether you host your own blog, it’s if you offer a unique perspective. I think that Liz Kolb’s cell phone blog at http://www.cellphonesinlearning.com/ is not a particularly pretty looking blog, but the content is rather unique. I find myself looking there often to see what new perspective on gadgets she comes up with. It’s fun. And she spend $10 a year. So can I.Maybe you want to read about my experience: http://drezac.blogspot.com/2008/12/why-i-chose-blogger-over-wordpress-and.htmlDR
I just remade my blog at blogger (http://drezac.blogspot.com), and I have had this very similar struggle with “to pay or not to pay.” This conversation makes me feel pretty good about staying there. When it all comes down to it, it’s not whether you host your own blog, it’s if you offer a unique perspective. I think that Liz Kolb’s cell phone blog at http://www.cellphonesinlearning.com/ is not a particularly pretty looking blog, but the content is rather unique. I find myself looking there often to see what new perspective on gadgets she comes up with. It’s fun. And she spend $10 a year. So can I.Maybe you want to read about my experience: http://drezac.blogspot.com/2008/12/why-i-chose-blogger-over-wordpress-and.htmlDR
Dan…I take what you wrote as a compliment since I am not a professional graphic designer :-)But…maybe I will be working on my design/graphics a bit in 2009!Liz
Dan…I take what you wrote as a compliment since I am not a professional graphic designer :-)But…maybe I will be working on my design/graphics a bit in 2009!Liz