I was reading a well known politic blog when I noticed that it has been temporarily moved to its subdomain, since the original main page and its contents was blocked by Bloggers due to suspected spam blog.

Imagine Blogger is like the owner of ‘luxury condominium’ in the heart of KL or Mont Kiara. He lets you stay there free of charge, not even a single cent. On the unit that you stay, you can name it whatever you want, put whatever furniture, electronic equipments that you desire, and you stay there happily, and have a lot of visitors, friends and relatives. Everyone compliments on your furniture/gadgets that you have. But 1 day, when you come back from somewhere, you found that the lock has been changed. You can’t even go in to get your valuable stuffs. The godfather doesn’t entertain your plea even though you beg him hundreds of time. You’re frustrated. Your effort and money spent so far is meaningless. You can’t get in anymore, FOREVER. How would you feel? Ok, this sounds too harsh. But think of this as the worst case situation.

Sometimes there is unwritten rules or blur lines between that can and can’t. As a ‘landowner’, or the owner, he has absolute power to do what’s necessary to ‘protect’ the interest of others.

I’m here not to write which one is true and which one is not, or trying to justify if the action has been backed up by concrete and valid reasons or not. But it just shows that the same fate can happen to everyone, even a big name such as him. Fortunate for him since he has backup all contents and an army of technical personals to deploy the contents immediately to the new place.

But what if it happens to people like you, who most likely to rarely backup our own job. The only thing that we can do is to beg ‘godfather’ or whatever blog platform administrator, to at least let us access our account temporarily and grab all the contents. There are a lot of consequences due to this action. If you’re about to kick off your business, this can slightly demotivate you and thus will affect your business. If your blog has started to gain attention from readers and you’ve started earning from Adsense ads, this can totally end your blogging career.

The question now is whether you’re willing to spend a few bucks and pour a little bit effort to kick off your blogging. Old folks used to say, no pain no gain. Is it still relevant in the era of web 2.0?

Is it worth and economical for a starter to set your own hosted blog? It is too technical? Not secured? Expensive? These are among the questions that I guarantee to pop out in your head when you’re about to start.

In terms of capital required, with only MYR100, you can already acquire a hosting package along with the domain name. Too technical? There are a lot of ‘how to blog’ ebooks and guides out there. Get one from SmartUsaha, one of the earliest blog I read about blogging. Easywordpress is another rich resource. All these blogs talk about WordPress, which the default setup itself is quite secured already. So you don’t have to put too much concern on that. Or attend seminars from the like of Irfan Khairi or Saiful Sham (for local market), and buy even books from problogger,

Why you need to host your own blog? The biggest and most obvious reason would be, you’d have total control of your blog. You have the freedom to write or voice out your opinion about certain things, without any concern of being banned unexpectedly. You may still be bounded to your own hosting company rules, which is usually limited to sexual or internet crime such as spamming or phishing. And in case if you break the rules, it’ll come with a warning and once you’ve removed the illegitimate content, the ban is lifted and your blog should available online afterward.

Apart from that, you’re free to monetize your blog. Put whatever script (as long as it is not malicious code), no one cares about it.

If you still insist to use Blogger, ask these questions to yourself and try to search the advantages by yourself on the net. Which one is the most appropriate one? Btw, WordPress is not the only free blogging platform out there, there are movable type, joomla and etc. The choice is yours but WordPress is no doubt the leader in blogging platform.

Why you should self host your blog?’

Why you should use WordPress?

Why you shouldn’t use Blogger blog?

Why you should use WordPress hosted blog (not wordpress.com)?