My self-hosting experience and advice (WordPress)

WordPress is, for me, the number one social media platform, and it is not just me that thinks this, according to recent reports.

I took my blog ‘self-hosted’ this week, an action which coincided with a report in Techcrunch that highlighted a boom in blogging compared to micro-blogging.

Personally I think Twitter is responsible for this boom because for millions of users like myself the service is the gateway to finding the best blogs on the blogosphere, inspiring others to take up writing.  Also, the demise of Twitter is much over reported.  Yes, growth in visitor numbers to Twitter.com has flattened, but who visits the site anyway?  Most of us use Tweetdeck or another sort of client.

But, alas, I digress….

I wanted to write this post to celebrate the beauty of taking your blog self-hosted, share some of the highs and lows, and to thank @vinceapplemac who helped me.

Hopefully this post will prove useful to someone else going through the self hosting process. I’m better at developing content than technical geekery, and I guess there are lots of people like me, who could find this post useful.

Firstly, I decided to use WordPress.org as a content management system (CMS), because the tool is itself a form of social media and there is huge interaction with other bloggers on the platform and beyond.  The ‘social’ aspect of blogging platforms are often much overlooked because many just consider blogging as another form of publishing. WordPress.com was simply brilliant because it is so ‘social’. I think .org is even better in this respect, so think wisely before choosing your CMS!

I also chose WordPress.org because it has much wider functionality than WordPress.com, which was so easy to use when I was starting out.  The .org version is even better because there is added fun to be had via a myriad of plug-ins.  The plug-ins cover everything from widgets for buttons to LinkedIn , through to SEO optimisation .  There is a widget for everything.

Next I bought a domain name, storage space on a server which sounds complicated, but is in fact easier than buying your shopping from Tesco.com.

Being a PR person, I am much better at the content side than the technical aspects, so I sought the counsel of @vinceapplemac , who linked WordPress.org to my domain and migrated the content from my existing blog to the new site.  Vince tells me this process is also easy, but it was a bit complex for me, so I recommend seeking some help for this step.

The next few days were spent setting up functionality, playing around with the plug-ins and reading up on some of the differences between .org and .com.

I also found this resource which I think people will find useful.  The presentation is for beginners, but I guess some people reading this will be beginners too and might find it useful:

I hope this was helpful for you!