Hello,

I use Blogger for my blog, but I notice the only respected blog service in the blogosphere is Wordpress. Don’t get me wrong, Wordpress provides stunning professional themes, but is Blogger really seen as unprofessional?

I’m contemplating making the switch to WP, but I would love to hear your thoughts about both services. Have you used Blogger and made the switch? Do you think making the switch would increase conversions and email subscriptions as opposed to staying with Blogger?

Thanks for your feedback.


Respectfully,
Mellissa Thomas
Freelance Writer

Actually, Google doesn’t index Blogger any faster. They would lose a lot of credibility if that were the case. But what you CAN do to speed up the indexing is to submit blog posts to Google+. One of our vendor partners has tested this and found that it can take as long as 5 days for a non-Google+ page to get indexed.

Blogger doesn’t have as good a reputation as something like WordPress, because it just isn’t as robust, the design seems almost cartoonish at times, and it lacks the engine power that WordPress has.

@mellissathomas Submitting once to Google+ is enough. I don’t know if it will show up higher if several people +1 it.

Hosting these days is incredibly cheap. There is no reason not to have your own domain name and Wordpress self-hosted. The reasons are many.

If you buy your domain name through a 3rd party, even a reputable hosting company, you may not really own the domain name. Check to see it is actually in your name and not in the name of the hosting company “on your behalf”. 

OR

Buy your own domain name outright from a registrar. I have used Namecheap.com exclusively for nearly 10 years. You can pay via paypal, another reason I like it. 

Another reason for buying your domain name outright is this. If there was an issue with payments on your hosting account, you may also find your domain name unavailable to you, or frozen. If you decided to move to another host, that host may hold your domain name hostage to prevent your leaving. 

Granted, not all hosting companies are as cut throat. But why get yourself into a “what if” situation. Buy your domain name directly from the registrar.

If you use free blogging platforms you have minimal control over what is on your site. This includes advertising, the kinds of themes/designs you can have or are limited to and no plugins to enhance your site (or only a few select plugins).

You don’t really own your content when you use a free site host. Heaven forbid you should lose access to your account, forget a password or something happened to the company. That could mean years and years worth of building your site up on that specific URL and potentially losing access to ALL of your content.

So why risk it? Free is free. But is it worth the time and energy you put into your blog or brand? For less than $20 a month (or even $10) you could avoid ALL the potential bad stuff and have way more control over your blog on your domain name. Seems a no brainer to me

Buying a domain name:  Namecheap.com
Reputable, reliable hosting: Hostgator.com

I have used both of the above companies very happily for nearly 10 years. Hostgator’s CS is fantastic, I get an answer and a resolution within an hour in most cases.

Stay far, far away from GoDaddy. 

Read reviews on the above sites and form your own opinion, don’t just take my word on it.

Hosting plans are so similar these days. The only thing that matters after that is customer service. Hostgator has it in spades, they run their servers with green energy and they have an excellent reputation.

As for owning domains through GoDaddy, I highly recommend getting them “pushed” to Namecheap. Just set up a free Namecheap account and follow instructions on Namecheap on how to have your domains transferred. Thereafter you only need to pay a yearly fee, the same fee everyone pays to their registrar to keep the domain name active, unless it were included in your hosting plan. I wouldn’t know if places like GoDaddy even do that.

Make sure the hosting company you choose has CPanel. CPanel hosting vs their own in-house platform or others (like Plesk) is the LEAST confusing to folks without much knowledge in hosting their own sites. 

I assure you though, whatever you don’t know, Hostgator will help you. If you “break” anything (as I have done more than once over the years), Hostgator will not only fix it for you but educate you on why it happened. Though sometimes I had to ask. 

That’s why I so highly recommend them.