Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year’s post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you’re interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

FTP support goes dead on March 26th, 2010. If you’re part of that 0.5%, don’t panic! A migration tool will be released in late February, and a blog dedicated to helping people transition is now online.

Millions of people who blog don’t want to deal with hosting their blog themselves, so they use a blogging service instead. There are many things that factor into the choice of blogging service, but one of them should always be site reliability. After all, if people can’t access your blog, it won’t get read.

Though services like Blogger, WordPress.com, and TypePad don’t give you as much control over your blog as you would have hosting it on your own (paid) hosting account, their uptime is quite impressive.

Pingdom did a recent test, over four months, to determine the reliability of various “instant blog” solutions. WordPress.com, Blogger, and TypePad all had no more than twenty minutes of total downtime. Some of the other services (which were polled every minute for the duration of the test) didn’t fare so well. Blog.com had over a day of downtime. Vox and LiveJournal were a bit excessive too, though their problem periods weren’t so excessive.

Not bad considering most of the services are free, or have free plans. They’re certainly a good option for smaller blogs, as they’re more stable than a lot of cheap shared hosting providers. (And you won’t be cut off for using “excessive CPU resources.”)

The internet is what can be called a “two-way medium.” This implies that anyone can create content and publish it online for others to consume, and they can do the same. You don’t just consume canned content provided by SuperMegaCorp, you can actually be involved in the publishing.

In contrast, TV and radio are one-way mediums. The evil supersized corporations (e.g. CBS, ClearChannel, ABC) own everything, and all you can do is consume the content they shove at you.

In the early days of radio and television, they were two-way mediums. Anyone with the expertise to build a radio transmitter and reciever could talk to other such people. (Give HAM Radio a try if you’d like to see what it’s like.) Then the FCC (or if you live outside the U.S., you probably have your own local equivalent) came along and sectioned everything off, licensing only a select few to broadcast. Then those companies merged and merged, eventually monopolizing the broadcast industry.

Free blog providers, like Blog*Spot and WordPress.com, help make the internet the two-way medium that it is. Anyone can set-up a blog and put their message online. That’s important. Very important. The ability for anyone to publish content to the internet is part of what makes it so special. Free blog providers put that ability into the hands of many more people, who wouln’t otherwise have blogs.

Yes, I know saying this sort of goes against my message that “you need a good design” and that “you should host your blog yourself.” But that message goes more toward people who want to become authoritative sources of information. If you’re not into all that, and just want a personal blog to put your thoughts out there for whoever, go ahead with Blog*Spot. I write more for people who want to write seriously and professionally, not personal bloggers. I’m not discounting personaly blogs, as I hope the above text has shown. I think they’re pretty important, since they put the power of web publishing in the hands of everyone, but I have to point out that there is a distinction between personal blogs, and blogs such as FreelanceSwitch, CNet, and this one. There’s a place for both types of blogs, and anyone can start one of either, but understand that creating a topical blog is an undertaking that requires careful planning, a bit more web experience, and a few dollars for a domain and hosting.

I believe that it’s important that it be possible for anyone who has something to say to publish their thoughts online. However, the key part is “anyone who has something to say.” I don’t like the idea of an internet full of narcissistic personal blogs and ad-filled John Chow wannabes. If you have something real to say, or if you’re an unusually interesting person, go right ahead and launch a blog. Plan it out though. Don’t just throw something together in five minutes on a whim. (Also, I recommend getting a domain name if you want to be taken seriously.)

I like the idea of web publishing being fairly easy, but sometimes I wonder if it’s a little too easy.

My general rule of thumb is “if you have something interesting to say, and the initiative the keep the blog going for longer than a year, go right ahead.”

If you pay for a cheap shared hosting account (1and1 has a $3.99/mo plan, which is good for a beginning blog), and install a copy of the free WordPress blogging software (that’s WordPress.ORG, not .com!), you gain much.

By hosting your blog yourself, instead of relying on a free service, you gain the ability to customize your design in ways impossible with the free services, to use WordPress plugins, run your own ads, and you’re not dependent on the service. If WordPress.com decided to charge a subscription fee instead of providing the free service they’ve provided, you’d have to pay or abandon your blog, pretty much. What if they changed something about their service, and you didn’t like it? (An example would be adding a big, forced banner ad to the top of your blog.)

If you’re using a free blog service, you can still make the switch to a self-hosted blog. WordPress has the ability to import posts from Blogger, WordPress.com, LiveJournal, and a few others (including RSS). However, you can lose some data in the transition. Depending on which service you use, you may or may not be able to keep the comments on your posts, for example.

Free blog services are great for personal blogs, and experimenting with blogging before deciding to commit to it, but if you want to run a serious blog, I highly recommend going with a self-hosted WordPress installation. At the very least, if you have a tight budget, get a domain and point it to your free blog. That way, if you decide to go the WordPress route, you will be able to move and keep your readers and backlinks.