When Your Data Leaves Home Without You

Those that know me best know that I much prefer to keep my data on my own servers, as opposed to using services such as PicasaWeb, Blogspot, and github. Something about giving up possession of my original content doesn’t sit quite right with me – maybe it’s my own experience with the “possession is nine-tenths of the law” adage, or maybe I’m just wary of free services. There’s also the problem of building up a brand that is on someone else’s domain – whatever popularity my content gets should be associated with my domain, not the provider’s. Whatever the reason, I am generally willing to put up with poorer performance (etc.) in order to host my services myself.

For my two new blogs I started out looking for a rails plugin, to add into plainlystated.com. I didn’t find anything that looked mature, and I didn’t feel like coding it myself (since these things always end up taking a lot longer than they initially seem when you add in captchas, admin features, layouts, etc). I got the latest version of Typo, but it was running at almost 60 megs of RAM, which is a lot for my little VPS. Plus, “satellite blogs” (two separate blogs running on one Typo) aren’t even supported “yet”, so it was gonna be a matter of hacking Typo (maybe with a third-party plugin), or running two instances, and both options seemed like a waste of semi-precious resources.

So, as you can see, I broke down and went with a free hosted solution. I looked briefly at wordpress, blogspot, and livejournal, but they all seem “good enough” so I went with ole’ reliable: Google.

In this case, there seem to be some substantial benefits to going with Blogspot:

• I don’t use my own resources,
• I don’t have to worry about security, system maintenance, etc.,
• I get automatic security updates and feature upgrades,
• I get plenty of free templates,
• It “just works”.

Blogspot also provides the option to host the blog from a subdomain of your own (which is how I have techspeak.plainlystated.com instead of techspeak.blogspot.com), which is pretty cool, and mitigates my concerns about building up my own brand.

Hopefully this decision will end up making me more comfortable with taking advantage of all the great free providers out there (maybe I’ll be linking to a PicasaWeb album before long).