I have never thought it was a good idea, to spend a lot of time building a blog, that you never actually own. I was telling a friend about the pitfalls of building a (free) wordpress.com or blogger.com hosted blog earlier, when I remembered this news story from ReadWriteWeb. It tells us how 70,000 innocent people lost their blogs, with little if any warning. All that time, all that effort – Gone.
A wise man once told me: “Never build a house on rented land.” He was right.
This is so true Jim, not only in the case of blogs.
Reviews need to be taken into consideration too. Google is well renowned for removing Google Maps reviews (and listings) without notice, and seemingly in a completely random manner. I have seen it happen with my own eyes.
There isn’t a perfect solution, but there are ways you can limit the damage if that ever happens to your business.
Oh I meant to say…
Do you use Ubuntu? I notice the link on your blogroll. I use it and love it.
Hi Jeremy. Yep – I use and LOVE Ubuntu.
Thanks Jim. Good advice.
New to blogging a year ago, I began experimenting with different types of blogging services and created a blog to track some family activities, photos and videos on Posterous. Never thought much of where it was hosted as I was just playing around, But today I realize that it has become a valuable treasure that I would like to maintain. I am concerned about it all going “poof” one day. Are there any tools that you know of that one can use to export blog content from one of these hosted services to an owned blog?
Hi Ronan,
I’m not a user of that service myself, but usually, these platforms have an import / export facility. I know wordpress.com certainly does. Check out the Posterous advice pages and forums. If you can’t see anything, try emailing them. If there isn’t an export option there are 3rd party tools that “claim” to be able to do this for you.
[...] on Posterous, we don’t really own the data. It sits on their servers and is controlled by [...]