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On a forum I belong to we were discussing the benefits of self-hosted vs free-hosted blogs, in this case with WordPress. One of the members was worried she might lose the increased readership she’s been getting over the past few months if she made a move now. And the reason why a move was being discussed was because another member had highlighted that free-hosted version of WordPress doesn’t take kindly to paid advertising and links being on their free supported sites. They are supposed to be non-commercial.  So, the information below gives an outline of the benefits of shifting to paid hosting for WordPress blogs.

If your traffic is increasing then it’s all the more important that you have your site where you have control.  There are things you need to think about:

• On a free hosted site there are restrictions on what you can do and limited templates.
• On a free hosted site – who is backing up your blog?
• What happens if your blog disappears?
• Do you have that content backed up?
• I have heard of people on Blogger.com whose blogs disappeared and some of them were not recovered. I haven’t heard of that at WordPress but I don’t hang around the forums there.  Don’t want to scare you but I do want you to think about this and explore the options available to you. If there is a backup system there, then that won’t be something to worry about.

The reasons why I like to have control on a paid hosting site:

• I can use whatever templates I wish – I just have to research to find them and then upload them, and activate them.
• I can install any plugins I want to use.
• I can make any modifications I wish, including background colours, text, etc.
• I can place advertisements on my blogs without worrying about whether I’m allowed to or not.
• I use a domain name of my choosing without wordpress or blogspot in the address.  Domains that relate to your keywords help a great deal.
• I have a regular backup operating so backups are emailed to me weekly (there’s a plugin for this).

You can divert your free hosted blog to your self-hosted blog – I have done this with blogger. The reasons I do this are:

• So someone cannot take over my old address and use it for their spammy efforts
• So that existing audiences can still find me and update their address list
• So that audiences at the free site can still find me when surfing through blogs.

I first decided to do this with my VA blog about 3 or more years ago – it was a scary thing to do but I did it and am really glad because that blog now carries my main domain address and my audience has grown and my PR (Google page rank) as well.  I discovered that someone took over my old blogger address because I didn’t think about it in those days and they were selling stuff that had nothing to do with being a VA – lesson learnt.  These days when I test blogs on Blogger and then shift them, I make sure I add a message on the top post of the new address and there is a redirect code you can put in html which takes people to the new site in a few seconds. I haven’t tried that with WordPress free site but even if you can’t put the redirect code you could certainly leave a message to say you’ve shifted to a new home address.  And the import feature in WordPress does work quite well to shift old posts if you wish to do that.

I hope that the above information will also help you in your decision making if you have been considering a similar move – whether it be from Blogger or WordPress free hosted sites.

Tags: About Blogging, Blogger, Wordpress by Kathie Thomas
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Are you getting one of these messages?  One of my clients was too with her WordPress blog and nothing I did seemed to help the problem. Did lots of research, asked questions at forums and tried to restore her database once again – she’d already had it done previously.  Checked that the index.php file was in place.

We decided to set up a new webspace with a new domain elsewhere and download all the files via FTP and then upload them to the new webspace.  I was about 1/2 way through the upload when I discovered something.  The webspace I’d set up for her was almost full and I had heaps of files to go.

So I went back to her other webhost and had to do a search in her Account Management system to locate the information relating to her webhosting. Gotta love these hosts that don’t use cpanel for ease of use!  Anyway, I discovered that she had 296mb of files in what was supposed to be a 150mb allotment.  I think I found the problem!

I immediately filled out a support request to her host to find out if in fact I was correct and could they do a temporary disk space increase so we could do a full backup and run a database export.  I emailed my client and told her what I believed I’d found. She’d been told by her host that she’d been hacked and she better upgrade her WordPress.

When I thought about it I remembered an incident a year or two earlier where a small website I was working on (25mbs) gave the same error message when I was trying to switch to a new template I’d uploaded and it took me awhile to figure out why that was.  I should have remembered.

So, if you are experiencing that same error message – before anything else – check your webspace allotment.  If it’s full, get it increased and then rerun whatever it is you’re doing.

Please let me know if this post has helped you as I did a search extensively looking for help on this issue and did not come across the possiblity of the webspace being full – hopefully I can save you the hours I put in to eventually find this out!

500 Internal Error, full webspace, server error, webpage won’t view

Tags: About Blogging, Technology, Wordpress by Kathie Thomas
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If you’re like me, you like to add tags for your keywords when blogging. Firefox had a great add-on that worked but when they upgraded the plugin no longer worked. And Technorati have either stopped or shifted the tag generator they used to have on display when you logged in. But a bit of searching found me one that works a treat and has many facets to it.  Free Tag Generator and Social Bookmark Generator.

I use it often, it’s very easy to use and it’s bookmarked so I can find it all the time.  Thought I’d share the treasure I found with all my readers.

Technorati tag, tag generator, tags for blogging

Tags: About Blogging, Technology, Writing by Kathie Thomas
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I’ve been doing a series of blog posts at another blog I own about Christmas in Melbourne.  But many of you may not be aware of that blog so I wanted to bring it to your attention here.

For those of you who do not live in the southern hemisphere, the thought of a warm summer, wearing summer clothing, being on the beaches and needing to hit the pools might be quite foreign. And yet, many of us still enjoy the traditional hot meals with turkey, or pork, even put shrimps on the barbie, as you might have seen in adverts about Australia.

I encourage you to click on the image or the link above and learn a bit more about Christmas in the area where I live.  In the meantime I hope you have a good time with your loved ones, get the rest that you need and that it’s not too stressful.

I want to thank everyone for their participation in comment discussions here at this blog or for simply being a reader.  I hope that you have sufficient break during the Christmas/New Year period so you can return to work refreshed and revitalised for 2009.

As you read this, my husband and I are also planning some time to ourselves, visiting with family and just taking a break from it all.  It’s nice to have him home on leave now and not having to leave early in the morning for work.  We can actually relax and have lie-ins for a couple of weeks.

Tags: About Blogging by Kathie Thomas
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