Better Blogging: Hosting Your Own Site

Apr 22nd, 2008 | By art rogers | Category: Blogging, Fun, Live Blogging

I mentioned in Better Blogging: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that Search Engines will evaluate your host server’s ability to handle traffic and will not send you what you can not handle. Nevertheless, having your own site instead of having a .blogspot.com, .wordpress.com, .typepad.com, .squarespace.com or whatever other free blog site you might acquire will cause you to stand out to Search Engines better and is easier for most people to find. Remember, although you are super tech savvy, most of the world is still catching up. The vast majority of the world does not read blogs, but if you want them to find your content, you have to get the Search Engines to rank you high enough that you are found before they get tired of looking through all the links.

There are other reasons. One is financial. Believe it or not, typepad is not free, although your blog will show up as a subdomain on their site. For a couple of dollars more per month, you can have your own .com website. Granted, this is more than the other subdomain sites, which are free, but it is not overly expensive. I bought my server space for two years up front and haven’t had to worry about it since that time. It’s coming up again, and I’ll evaluate as the time draws near, but I use Bluehost and they are pretty good – constantly upgrading, etc.

By the way, I’ve given this before, but I’ll give you another link to “Who is Hosting This?” Go to the site and input the address of the site you wish to know about, and it will return the registered host of the domain in question. Just in case you want to know who your favorite blogger uses as a host.

As I mentioned, performance is an issue. I know that I just said that Bluehost is good with its servers. It is. But. Did you know there is more to server speed that you should consider?

Up until recently, the size, speed, operating system and uptime (time your servers were running properly, which equals the time your site functioned properly as well) were all that you had to consider when it came to choosing a host.

That was all I worried about when I signed on with Bluehost and all that I concerned myself with until I found this out: The scientists that actually invented the internet – no, not Al Gore, but the physicists at Cern – have actually already re-invented the internet.

Here’s the brief sketch and a link to the full story.

They invented the internet to store data that they were collecting as they attempted to record the splitting of atoms in the world’s largest supercollider. Well, the old internet has proven to be insufficient to handle the data, because, no matter how big and fast the computers they attempt to use to record everything, the massive amounts of data that get collected bottles up on phone lines that are not efficient, even for phone service. Thus, they have replaced the phoneline connections with a series of fiber optics called “The Grid.”

The Grid is 10,000 times faster than the typical BROADBAND connection. Think, the fastest connection you can get vs. instant. The only thing slowing you down now is your own computer. What’s this got to do with blogging? As technology advances, prices will come down. This will one day be affordable. Well, first it has to be available, then it will become affordable. It will happen a lot faster than the first internet, though. That’s what I think, anyway.

Finally, Layered Technologies offers a different type of grid. Although out of most people’s price range at $49/mo, LT handles your information by spreading it out over several “nodes” rather than piling all on one machine, which can only give your site so much time if it also happens to host one or more busy sites. Thus, the requests for your info gets shared over a system of servers rather than just one machine. That is also technology that is going to get cheaper as time goes by.

Heck, it’s already cheaper than a tank of gas, though that is not saying much.