There are a lot of discussions on this website about the benefits of hosting your own blog versus sticking with blogger. Most of those conversations are over my head--a sure indicator that I should stick with blogger.
But I've already gotten ahold of my own url address (www.chocolateincontext.com) and I currently redirect traffic from there to my blogger blog (www.chocolateincontext.blogspot.com). Not only is it incredibly simple to tell people to visit chocolateincontext.com, I feel that having my own web address is beneficial to me on a professional level. Of course, as soon as people click on chocolateincontext.com, the reroute happens and they see the bloger address in their web browser, decreasing the professional appearance a bit. So I think I'd like to take one more small step away from blogger, and actually locate my blog at the chocolateincontext.com address.
I know there's an option of doing your hosting BY blogger AT another address. Does that simply mean that everything will stay the same in terms of how I can use blogger's program and storage space? If so, how do I do this? (And are there any downsides?) I know that when I set up the blog, blogger offered me this option, but I'm not sure how to do the changeover now.
Any advice would be appreciated. Many thanks!
Emily
This Post was written by Emily Stone from Chocolate in Context
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5 comments:
Getting your blog setup in an external domain isn't that hard, and once you're done the whole thing is transparent. You'll never notice the difference between hosting it on blogspot and hosting it on your own server.
The only downside is that you'll have to reroute all the old internal links in all your old posts.
The distinction is between blogger and blogspot. Blogspot is a hosting service. Blogger is a tool for publishing that has built-in support for Blogspot (same company). I use Blogger, but I push the files to another server altogether. Look under the Publishing section of Settings. When you uncheck Blogspot hosting, you should get all sorts of ftp options. If you have your own domain, the provider will give you this info.
As William says, the biggest problem is fixing all your links, plus any links by other people (imbb round-ups, for instance). Blogger itself should work identically.
You can just mask your address if you want. If you look at mattbites.com you'll see that's what he's done. The address always shows as "mattbites" even when you click on other pages.
Sounds good. I'll give it a try. Thanks.
Personally, I have been using a redirect (candyblog.net to typetive.com/candyblog) for over a year now and I don't think it's hurt the "professionalism" of my blog.
However, I would recommend moving away from blogspot as a host if you are going professional. They are prone to problems and rather unresponsive.
As Amy suggested, an address mask is also pretty good, but makes permalinking and building a high technorati rating a little more difficult. (Technorati should really allow you to roll up several urls into one blog profile.)
I finally moved my personal blog from blogspot to my own domain last fall. My traffic has rebounded just fine, though the internal links were a bit of a bear.
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