Thoughts on going self-hosted

This post in my #BlogLife series is a guest post from Maria who blogs at Mummytologan.

Maria recently went self-hosted with her WordPress blog and I wanted to find out what it was like. Thanks maria for taking the time to guest post for me. Read on to hear Marias thoughts on the process

Firstly I want to say thanks to Rich at one hull of a dad for letting me guest post in his new blog series. As promised I am going to be detailing my experiences with WordPress and how I found going self-hosted. But first it’s only right that I introduce myself and my blog, so here goes; My name is Maria Lincoln, I’m 24 and I live in a small town in North Wales. I run a blog over at mummytologan.com which I’ve been working on for about three or four months now. I mainly blog about my son and our day to day adventures and all that crazy fun leap stuff!

WordPress- my thoughts

Let me just start by telling you why I wanted to start blogging in the first place. Honestly having a baby and not many real life friends can get quite isolating, so I needed something to do when the baby sleeps, and so that’s when I turned to blogging.

I’m not new to blogging and I have made and wrote many a blog posts in my time but all non-serious, for fun blogs that just helped me to waste some time as a College/University student (And yes they are still out there on the World Wide Web somewhere).

WordPress has always been my go to blogging platform just because of how familiar it was to me, seeing as we had to use WordPress at Uni so it was only natural that I went down that route. However, I have used blogger and other blogging platforms in the past like Tumblr but none seemed as customisable as WordPress (But I may be wrong).

That’s the first thing I love about WordPress, is the customisability – there are dozens of free and easy to set up themes for you to use and alter to your individual tastes whether you want blue or pink text/backgrounds, or have a subtle or in your face homepage (And plenty more). Obviously, there are some drawbacks to just having a free WordPress account, that is you can’t add certain elements unless you use some plugins which are only available on a self-hosted WordPress account (That I’ll come to in the next section).

From what I’ve heard, WordPress is a lot more up to do date with the current times and seems to be a lot more popular than other blogging platforms, and a little birdy told me that Google loves WordPress sites just because of how clean the coding is that runs the site (some technical jargon here which I won’t bore you with) (NerdAlert!)

Overall I LOVE WordPress! It has definitely been a real help to me in reaching my blogging goals, and because there are lots of different themes I’m not limited to just one look if I ever fancied a switch up. So if you have been inspired by this and you are using blogger then there are ways to transfer your blog/blogposts from your blogger site to WordPress (Link to that how to document here)

Going self-hosted - the process

Now, this is where the fun/scary/technical/overwhelming stuff happens. Well, it was overwhelming for me but the good news is that I got used to it pretty much straight away. The whole process of going self-hosted was pretty straight forward, first thing first was to search around for a domain using any of the hosting sites out there, I personally use 1&1 just because of how cheap it was. So once I had signed up with 1&1 it was time to choose my domain name (this is what you want your blog to be known as on the web, i.e. mummytologan.com – that’s my domain name). And then all that’s left to do is choose how long you want to take out your domain for and what level of hosting you want and security and all those little extras (which I didn’t bother with).

After I’d paid and everything was final I just had to wait for my domain name to propagate (publicise) so that myself and other people could actually see my blog on the web. I also chose a WordPress managed self-hosted account, this basically means that all I have to worry about is writing the content and customising my blog with plugins etc., and 1&1 worry about the rest- updating the plugins, making sure that my site is up to date with the web’s current standards.

Overall the whole process of going self-hosted setting up my WordPress blog was pretty simple and didn’t take me long at all to get my head around it. But now I have other things to worry about – SEO and DA scores (Don’t even go there – I still don’t understand this stuff).

As long as you’re enjoying what you’re writing about and are having fun then that’s all that matters. Whether you’re self-hosted, using blogger or Tumblr, just getting your content out there is more important not the platform. I know a lady who uses Instagram as her blogging platform (each to their own) If it works for you then do it.

Thanks for reading, hope it's inspired you to get blogging.

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