How to Avoid Being a Disappearing Blogger

Imagine that you get up one morning and want to check your blog to see if you got any comments overnight.

But instead of loading the page you get some sort of error message. Your blog, hosted on a free platform has disappeared. See this true life example of writer Martyn Clayton's blog

All those well written articles are gone and with them the comments assembled with time and hard work . . .

Poof! 

Connections between your blog and related posts in a variety of other blogs: evaporated. The position you'd finally achieved when you googled your keywords or the name of your blog: worthless. Why? Because when someone clicks on your links you're not there. There go the potential clients and customers.

In short, if you're designing a web presence you should never use a free host unless you don't care about what happens to your content. Shelley Lowery of Websource emphasizes that

 
"In order to establish credibility, you must be willing to invest in your own domain name and professional web hosting. Websites hosted on free servers are not taken seriously . . .
"In addition, free hosting services don't need to have a reason to shut your site down. Free hosting services aren't interested in your business or how hard you've worked to design your website and create a steady stream of traffic."

Yes, it's time for my mantra again. If you're tech savvy get a host and build a blog on whatever platform you like.  Wordpress is clean, elegant and unless you do your worst to over-tweak it, it screams that you're a class act.

But - if you're like me and need a painless, feature rich platform that can be as simple as ABC and you don't need to know one bit of html to use, get thee to typepad pronto!

Why? Your blog will not disappear and you don't have to have your own server. No hosting doublespeak to deal with and you won't have to download software or do any of those things that make your eyes roll back in your head. You don't have to even begin to understand those gobledygook letters like PHP, MySQL, etc.

Do you want to be sure that your blog is there tomorrow? Can you afford NOT to spend $4.95 a month?

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Links web hosting, Mindy's Blogger Blog is gone, and: Mahndisa who says: "Fellow blogger Robosquirrel is back on Blogger again. Inexplicably his blog disappeared one day"

Comments

[Susan]

Thanks for the comments, manekineko. Answers to your questions deserve a blog post all their own.

[manekineko]

Do these free services not allow database backups?

Paid services can lose your data too - it is not as if only the free ones are guilty of this.

Maybe the key is in backing up your post database regardless of what platform you use?

Also I don't agree with the "not having a domain name makes you less credible" thing at all - everyone knows Post Secret, it's consistantly one of the most popular blogs period, has resulted in a book deal and as far as I know does not have its own domain and uses a Blogspot account.

[Carol Wilkerson]

As I read through your post, I was mentally calculating just how much of my blogger site was backed up, and so thankful that I have at least my paid site on typepad. Hopefully, they won't "poof" me into the bloggisphere before my trial period is over. I am going to go back up everything right now. Beep, beep, beep....

[Rick]

Amen to that, Susan! In addition, back up your blog to your computer or another server. Even paid services have problems. Backing up is that one extra bit of insurance to make sure you don't lose everything if something happens.