A Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

Question:  I was wondering what the advantages would be to hosting your own wordpress blog versus using the hosting provided by the website.

Also, is it possible to do Google Adsense with the blog hosted by wordpress?

Answer:   When you speak of “provided by the website”, do you mean WordPress.com?  If so, the difference is big.  They don’t allow you to put Adsense on it.  You can put the code into your pages and widgets and they’ll strip it right off.  If you attempt to sell anything from your blog, they will suspend your site and no amount of begging will get it back, not even to change it.  In fact, any violation of their terms and they’ll ignore your service requests.  That’s the nature of free.  You will also not be allowed to use your own themes and you won’t be able to use plugins. 

If you host WordPress yourself, you don’t need to download anything.  Today’s web hosting plans include very easy to use software installers found in your web hosting control panel and already include the WordPress software, plus a whole lot more.  Just tell it where to install and give it a username and password and you’re good to go.  Then everything you couldn’t do at WordPress.com, you CAN do on your own installation.

Good WordPress Hosting

WebHostingHub – I personally like the web hosting from the Hub.  No matter where you host, WordPress runs kinda slow right out of the box unless you use some plugins like Use Google Libraries and a caching plugin.  It’s just the nature of the beast because your posts, pages and other stuff are not actually web page, but rather data in a database on the web hosting server.  When someone clicks on a link on your blog to read a post, the WordPress software has to fetch the information from the database and then dynamically make a “web page” out of it.  That extra traffic slows things down.  The servers at WebHostingHub are optimized for super fast WordPress performance.  I recently transferred several of my blogs to a Hub hosting account and was blown away by the increase in speed.

iPage, BlueHost, HostMonster and HostGator are all good hosts for WordPress, too.  All companies mentioned pretty much offer the same unlimited features.  The iPage control panel is vDeck and the others use the cPanel control panel.  vDeck is simple, cPanel is a little more geeky, but still easy to use.

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