Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by julia.stueber on December 16, 2011 at 12:33pm

Hi Sam!

Oh, what a great blog (and cute kids) you have there!!

Err, sorry, I got distracted. ;-)

I use Wordpress for all of my websites and I love it for many reasons:

1. It is free!
2. It is easy to setup and easy to use - and has constantly became easier over the last years.
3. You can enhance it easily with the right plugins to be more search engine friendly as well as making life easier. For example: I have a little notepad on my article page, so I can leave notes to myself and other authors.
4. You can even run a shop with it or send your newsletter through it, which I did 5 minutes ago!
5. You can get an awful lot of designs for it which you can change very easily, too.

Let me show you some examples.

This is my German website about lactose intolerance: http://www.einfach-laktosefrei-leben.de I bought the theme, because it is nice and clean. The newsletter is send through Wordpress.

The two following pages have the same (!!) theme which I customized quite a lot (and very easily):

www.the-happy-mom.com

www.easy-online-marketing-for-you.com

Changing the structure, the navigation etc. again is very easy and quick to handle.

The only thing you have to be aware of with wordpress is that your blog can and will be attacked from hackers as this is such a common software. I had my German blog seriously attacked a few weeks ago and now put up a firewall within wordpress, which is available as a plugin. But as long as you do backups and make your blog safe you will be fine. :-)

I can't really help you with the hosting, as I use the German 1&1. :-)

Greetings from a stormy Rhineland,

Julia

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Permalink Reply by Rachel McGuire on December 16, 2011 at 2:57pm

I used blogger for 3 years before I switched to wordpress, and I too use Godaddy and have for over 10 years now. Down side first: up until this year I was very happy with my use of godaddy for hosting my blog thru them, it wasn't until my blog became pupular / high traffic and started getting more than 4000 hits (yea that's not that much) a month, it started bogging down the server on Godaddy's end (my site goes down nearly every day at 2pm and stays down until about 9 pm each night - mid month)  and they said they couldn't do anything about it, that I needed to upgrade to my own secure server @ $100 a month or to a Virtual server @ $30 a month. I haven't made the upgrade yet. I pay for the $15 a month wordpress ultimate package and it is really good just can't handle much traffic even though it states unlimited. I think you will love it, it will take at least 2-3 years to get to the point of needing to upgrade. Like I said, it's on a shared server and once you start getting quite a bit of traffic it might cause a problem.

BUT, if you have enough income coming in then you can upgrade to your own server and this won't be a problem.  Wordpress has so many features you can use and is so very easy to use. Blogger is just so darned limited.  You can see mine here at http://amomsrantings.com let me know if you need any help or advice. Godaddy is great about walking you through the whole process of gettin set up and all that. But let me know if you need help otherwise, i've been down that road and would be more than happy to do what I can. I highly recommend it..

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Permalink Reply by Sam Olsson on December 18, 2011 at 9:38pm

Thank you both for responding. Sounds like Wordpress does allow for a lot of flexibility as I expected. Rachel, I already have close to 4000 visitors a month now, so am a bit worried about uptime after reading your comments. I am not bringing in any income right now, and that has not really been my goal so far (but started focusing a bit more on advertising).

I get a lot of search traffic so started worrying about page ranking as well if I switch. I'll have to figure that out, too.

Julia, I love the happy mom blog! My German is a bit rusty since I haven't taken any since 9th grade and that is a loooooong time ago.

I might take you up on your offer to help Rachel. If I decide to take the jump I think I'll do so next week or the following week since I have a couple of weeks off work.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Sathre-Vogel on December 18, 2011 at 11:26pm

We have a self-hosted wordpress blog and I can't imagine going with either blogger or wordpress.com - they are so limiting! With a self-hosted wordpress blog there are no limits on what you can do. You can find a theme you like and then customize it however you want. It's definitely worth it.

We started out with GoDaddy, but switched to Hostican. I would recommend not going with GoDaddy as I've been hearing horror stories about them lately.

We have a dedicated server which is sorta expensive, but it's nice to know it can handle a lot of traffic if the need arises. We've typically been getting around 25,000 unique visitors per month, but this month we had a viral post and have gotten 600,000 uniques with over THREE MILLION PAGE VIEWS!!! In two weeks! Fortunately, our server handled it just fine - the site went down the second night of the spike for about 30 minutes, but otherwise they've handled this just fine.

If you are serious about your blog, I think it's worth going self-hosted so you don't have switch in the future. Start out on a shared server and you can upgrade to a dedicated one if you get the traffic.

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Cash Hanson on December 21, 2011 at 8:18pm

Maybe Host Gator is a good option as far as servers not being down I've heard alot of good comments about them.

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Permalink Reply by Sam Olsson on December 23, 2011 at 9:51am

Thanks for the suggestion Lisa, I'll check them out.

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Cash Hanson on December 23, 2011 at 11:39am

@ Sam Your Welcome:)

http://www.mompreneurmogul.com/

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Permalink Reply by Karla Richter Andrew on December 24, 2011 at 7:18am

Let me know if you need any help too.  I do a lot of wordpress.  I'm also a programmer (but it seems there aren't many times wordpress things need many changes that need programmming) :)

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Permalink Reply by Rachel McGuire on December 24, 2011 at 12:03pm

Nancy is right.. I am with Godaddy and I wouldn't recommend going with them. I am having so many problems it's not funny. I Plan to move my hosting and my domain name to somewhere els as soon as I've done the research to see who's best to go with.   Thanks Nancy for the input also, I needed to hear some more options for myself as well.

Nancy Sathre-Vogel said:

We have a self-hosted wordpress blog and I can't imagine going with either blogger or wordpress.com - they are so limiting! With a self-hosted wordpress blog there are no limits on what you can do. You can find a theme you like and then customize it however you want. It's definitely worth it.

We started out with GoDaddy, but switched to Hostican. I would recommend not going with GoDaddy as I've been hearing horror stories about them lately.

We have a dedicated server which is sorta expensive, but it's nice to know it can handle a lot of traffic if the need arises. We've typically been getting around 25,000 unique visitors per month, but this month we had a viral post and have gotten 600,000 uniques with over THREE MILLION PAGE VIEWS!!! In two weeks! Fortunately, our server handled it just fine - the site went down the second night of the spike for about 30 minutes, but otherwise they've handled this just fine.

If you are serious about your blog, I think it's worth going self-hosted so you don't have switch in the future. Start out on a shared server and you can upgrade to a dedicated one if you get the traffic.

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Permalink Reply by Karla Richter Andrew on December 24, 2011 at 12:08pm

I use 1 and 1- I've had a few things that I had to tweak in the past, but they are getting better.  I even reached customer support today after cleaning a few too many files out of my directory (took out one that was needed) 

I've used GoDaddy in the past for a work site and wasn't overly impressed.  We use Midphase for our local museum and we haven't had too many issues there either. They are nice enough to donate to the museum site I manage (http://brimsbg.org).

My main site is http://teched4kids.com and I've had it on 1and1 for several years.  They have deals where you can get domains free for a year and may have a deal on hosting even with the same type of thing..... 

My first hosting provider was lunarpages, but they got a little too expensive for me.

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Permalink Reply by Debbie Hewitt on December 25, 2011 at 12:41am

After being on Blogger for 3 years, I just recently moved to WordPress self-hosted, too, and I LOVE it.  I HATED, absolutely LOATHED Blogger there for the last year or so.  Not only is it so limiting, if you want to be a 'professional blogger,' working with brands, companies, PRs and such, self-hosted is the way to go.  So many of them just stay away from Blogger bloggers for various reasons, but one is, they think if you don't want to 'invest' in your business (your site), then why should THEY? and you know what, they're right!

I went with InMotionHosting.com as my host.  I chose the business class, got a good sized discount for buying 2 yrs instead of 1 (they have money back guarantee), you get to run up to 2 sites off of it, and so much more!  They're online chat is 24 hours, and those tech guys literally answered any and ALL of my stupid questions, lol...I was SUCH a WP newbie, I had no idea the first thing, seriously, and although they can't really answer questions about WP specifically, they were able to guide me through some things, like how to get to my WP dashboard, things like that, and they gave me links to tutorials for all kinds of stuff (the point is, they made an effort and tried).  Once, they talked with me with their online chat for well over an hour, and they never displayed an annoyed tone or anything.  SO FAR (knock on wood), I've had NO downtime, and I'm quite happy with them.  As within anything, time will tell, but they have one of the highests hosting reviews on almost every host review site out there...worth the money to me if it's my site we're talking about, that's my blood, sweat, and tears, and I want it coddled.  It took me several years to build it up to where it is, it can easily all go crashing down with just the one mistake of the wrong host.

Good luck, once you move, you'll love it!!

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Sathre-Vogel on December 25, 2011 at 2:45am

Would you tell us what problems you're having? Everybody keeps talking about problems with GoDaddy, but they don't detail it so we'll know what's happening.

Rachel McGuire said:

Nancy is right.. I am with Godaddy and I wouldn't recommend going with them. I am having so many problems it's not funny. I Plan to move my hosting and my domain name to somewhere els as soon as I've done the research to see who's best to go with.   Thanks Nancy for the input also, I needed to hear some more options for myself as well.

Nancy Sathre-Vogel said:

We have a self-hosted wordpress blog and I can't imagine going with either blogger or wordpress.com - they are so limiting! With a self-hosted wordpress blog there are no limits on what you can do. You can find a theme you like and then customize it however you want. It's definitely worth it.

We started out with GoDaddy, but switched to Hostican. I would recommend not going with GoDaddy as I've been hearing horror stories about them lately.

We have a dedicated server which is sorta expensive, but it's nice to know it can handle a lot of traffic if the need arises. We've typically been getting around 25,000 unique visitors per month, but this month we had a viral post and have gotten 600,000 uniques with over THREE MILLION PAGE VIEWS!!! In two weeks! Fortunately, our server handled it just fine - the site went down the second night of the spike for about 30 minutes, but otherwise they've handled this just fine.

If you are serious about your blog, I think it's worth going self-hosted so you don't have switch in the future. Start out on a shared server and you can upgrade to a dedicated one if you get the traffic.

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