Standalone Weblog Platform

Another benefit that standalone weblog platforms have is that visitors will also indirectly read your blog with greater confidence, giving you more authority. This is because if you are willing to lay a bit of money down on blog infrastructure, your visitors are more inclined to believe what you saying rather than some “fly-by-night” blog operator using a free account. An additional benefit is also the domain name of the blog, with standalone systems you can have addresses like http://www.MYBLOG.com which is much easier for the reader to remember rather than http://MYBLOG.HOST.com or http://www.HOST.com/MYBLOG.

On the other hand there are also some disadvantages to having a standalone weblog platform. The first and most obvious would be the technical know-how that is necessary to actually get the blog up and running. The process to start-up a standalone blog can be quite complicated and may take some time. The design can sometimes be from an existing template but the behind-the-scenes infrastructure work such as domain name registering, hosting, content management integration is quite complicated especially if you a new to the blog world.

Additionally, nothing will be free, you will have to buy almost everything from the domain name to the hosting and the even the pictures if you intend on using copyrighted material. The initial outlay isn’t extremely high but can cause an initial dent in your pocket before you even make money on the blog.

Also, standalone weblogs are much less common than hosted blogs. Because of this relative rarity, support might be an issue if you don’t know what you are doing. You can always ask questions in forums but finding the solution to your question may take a few extra hours of digging around. The solutions to standalone weblog platforms are never as easy to find as hosted weblogs because of their relative scarcity in use.

Overall, my personal preference is still with standalone weblog platforms as they offer freedom in terms of scalability, flexibility in design and are also much more secure compared to free hosted weblog platforms. For me it’s just nice to know that once you wake up in the morning that your blog is still up and running.

 Standalone Weblog Platform: Part 1