Time for a switch to Google Blogger from Self-Hosted Wordpress

The last three years has been a very interesting journey. I stared out with a website for my English students to take tests online, but a computer wasn't available for use in class so it was just reference and testing.  I learned how to use Google Adsense and experimented with other systems.

I later stared this blog as a self-hosted wordpress blog manually installed. Quite a lot has changed at the time you could post a datafeed catalog and you'd get listed in search engine results and get sales.  Competition has increased and the economy had basically collapsed and it still is far from recovering.

Even though conversions are down costs have increased. Domain registration costs seem to have gone up a couple dollars per domain too.  Coupon codes for hosting discounts don't seem to apply on renewals even if the email with the code says it does. I went from one to two hosting accounts and back to one, but on a different host than the first.

This last year my focus has changed from affiliate marketing to earning royalties on my visual artwork . It is much less than I was making before the economy collapsed, but I know my designs and artwork will be available and searchable whereas affiliate marketing depends on other people's work.  In the last couple years I've seen several affiliate programs steal commissions that I earned or break tracking. Other good programs that I was working with would switch to a different affiliate network and would stop converting although I can't say why. It is a slow race, but the only negative I see is the investment in DVDs to back up my files.  Still selling art and graphic design is full of learning, but I had learned how to program in PHP and mysql and create complicated catalogs and automated feeds among other things. I've learned that we need to keep learning and experimenting and be able to grow and change.

As part of this change I made a tough decision. I had been analyzing costs for having websites self-hosted and comparing that with the income and this last year the income has been about even with costs and as I get close to the time I need to renew my web hosting account (about $120 dollars per year prepaid), I decided to look for alternatives. I decided on using Google Blogger moving my blogs from Wordpress (which I've learned to hack and program plugins for).

Pros of the switch:

1. cost -  Only pay for domain registration renewals and Internet service to access the sites.
2. maintenance - less time spent on upgrades. Wordpress updates several times a year and has security updates which is great, but even with online upgrades from each site, it is still several hours a month to update my different sites. With Blogger, Google updates and maintains the server(s).
3. Design - Google Blogger recently released atractive blog designs as attractive as Wordpress designs. I was really surprised since when I tried Blogger a few years ago all the designs were ugly and making changes like design and sidebar width was complicated.
4. Blog statistics - Yes, there are statistics tracking including Google Analytics as well as WordPress plugins for blog stats, but these stats are like Google analytics and appear on a tab in the blog admin.  When I had tracking stats as a plugin I got a complaint from the host about resource use. :-(

Cons of the switch

1. No more automation.  I spent a long time learning PHP and mysql to make scripts to make product catalogs and posts to feature products, but you can't do that on Blogger. So no cool scripts unless I learn Javascript and don't need to save data. 

2. No extreme customization - Yes, I know you can add javascript and use a few widgets, but Blogger is very simple compared to WordPress's customization option using plugins and their API. 

3. Loss of control -  At the end of the day, a blog hosted at Blog spot could get removed or have posts removed since I no longer control the hosting of the site. I can only export the content and hope nothing happens.

Since I don't have English students requiring online testing, I can take down that software. If I find the need for it I could always reopen a shared hosting account later. 

The final consideration in the switch is e-mail. I want to maintain at least 2 email addresses and e-mail hosting is typically around a couple dollars per month per domain so right there I thought I was stuck paying for hosting, but I did a search and read about Google Apps.  Google Apps lets you set up your domain's e-mail through Gmail. I'm still experimenting, but yesterday I converted one of my sites to Gmail using Google apps, I set up an email address with the domain and I added the domain as a custom domain to my blog here. 

About an hour ago I was able to send and receive e-mail to the account and the custom domain worked for the blog.  

I will try adding my original domain to this blog and set up Google Apps email for it as a further test. If all goes well, I will continue to move my sites to Google Blogger blogs and set up email for those crucial accounts before my hosting needs to be renewed in the next couple months.

Will I keep my domains?  I guess it depends on whether or not I get enough traffic and earnings to justify the cost, but I think I will keep most of them. The good thing is that if I no longer want a domain with a blog at Blogger, I can just remove it and use the Google blog subdomain and still have a site and traffic.  I can imagine myself creating a few new blogs just for fun without a custom domain since I won't have to worry about the expense.

Why didn't I use Google Blogger before? Well first I don't know when Google Apps was released. I wanted a professional e-mail address for my business cards and contacts for classes and graphic design work.  I am sure it wasn't available before.

The Blogger system didn't include attractive templates, static pages, social bookmarking or statistics tracking as it does now.  It didn't include post dating to make future posts either. All of these changes happened in the last year and a half as far as I can tell by reading the Blogger blog. I am very impressed!

It went from a very limited confusing system to one that lets you make changes fast and get blogging!

Thank you Google Blogger team for making this a system I'm willing to switch my blogs to.

Google's purchase of Feedburner was surprising. I had an account before the purchase, but I am very impressed with how it is automated to include ads and the feed address is automatically added to Feedburner's display. Very cool! I also like how the new templates let you select an Adsense advertisement configuration in just one click. I don't need to copy and paste the code anymore.

What about my LMS and other custom code? Don't worry I'm backing up all my scripts on DVD so when I need it I can set up hosting for it. :-)  I still like Wordpress I just don't want to mess with hosting when I have this great alternative.