Hosted with Your own Petard

Domain or not to domain that is the question...

A domain will always cost something.  As of the writing, they cost about $10. You can find sales. I saw one for or 99 cents from Godaddy.com. So look around. But $10 is not that much to start.

Think of a domain as a RV and the host is the campground where you park it.

Hosting usually costs from a few dollars to many dollars per month, depending on the services that you need and/or want. Hosting is also more involved than being hosted by Blogger.com or WordPress.com.
But you have more control and can customize your sight more. Your sight will look more professional and will be easier to remember if you have a domain name. www.yourdomain.com versus www.yourdomain.wordpress.com or www.yourdomain.blogspot.com

You are more likely to have back up when you have a domain name and a hosting company.  Google has an offshoot called Data Liberation. among their many offerings is a backup feature.

Through Blogger, Google will hosts a custom domain for free: http://www.blogger.com/features
You can use a domain that you already have or use the tools from Blogger and Google Apps. Although I found the tools less than intuitive (more on that later).

So far this post has been pretty Blogger.com heavy. This is because many of the things Google offers for free. You can also start off slower and learn little by little with Blogger. Ultimately, I think that having your own domain and host with the WordPress software (which is free) installed, will allow the most flexibility, control and customization. There are a myriad of "Plug Ins" to do just about anything you can imagine and you can create your own, if they don't have what you want and you are tech savvy. Also WordPress.com inserts ads at its own discretion. Blogger on the other hand only adds them if you sign up for Adsense. Adsense is an avenue for monetizing your sight. Adsense also customizes the ads to the user viewing the page. Some think this is intrusive and Big Brother like. I do not. I like the fact that I may actually want to click on the ads, because they interest me and may lead me to something I want to get involved with. WordPress does have an Adsense plug in, that you can install in your own host.



Google works with you with Adsense, while Wordpress.com charges you $30 per year to be add free, you can use Adsense with a Wordpress.

So I decided to buy a domain and let Blogger host is for free. I was making it harder than I had to, it seems, as I could not find the correct tutorial, right away and I was afraid to click the radio button for "On a top-level domain (www.example.com)"  or "On a sub domain (foo.example.com)". I thought that would restart the process.

I am finding that, often, the steps needed to use Google products require going back to a previous page and doing something else. Itis not a linear process.

Here are the directions I found first, I think from the Google Wallet page, they are similar, but are related to installing Google apps, not getting your custom domain name up and running on Blogger. These directions also demonstrate the back and forth nature of the steps that it takes to use some Google products.

You get an E-Mail from Google Apps telling your domain has been registered, but the help link "https://www.google.com/support/a" brings you to a page with a lot of links on it, not directly to instructions you need. So it took a lot of fishing. I don't like fishing much, as I see it, the only use of fishing is to drink beer with my dad (bonus if you get to have fish diner)

Here are a few examples of what you get for what you pay.

                              WordPress         Blogger
Storage                  3GB storage       1GB Pictures on Picasa 250k per picture (mobile)
Custom Domain     $13 and up          $10
Ads Free               $30                     Adsense if you make an account(see above)

I admit that this post is two dimensional.

Here are posts on Problogger and other links, which I found helpful: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/15/choosing-a-blog-platform/comment-page-3/

http://wordpress.org/showcase/

2006 platform poll http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/01/18/blog-platforms-poll-results/

Google+ $2.49 per month for aditional 25GB http://support.google.com/picasa/answer/39567/
http://support.google.com/picasa/answer/1224181?hl=en&ref_topic=1399133

Business Gmail for $5/user 25GB of storage, through Google Apps/enterprise/apps/business/products.html#sites

WordPress space upgrade: http://en.support.wordpress.com/space-upgrade/