Self Hosted or Hosted

One of the first things that have to be decided when you are getting ready to start a website, whether if it is for a personal site, business site, or a hobby site is whether you are going to host the site yourself and or a hosted service.

If you are building a blog type site this is not as critical at the start.  You can easily start your site on a free hosted blog site and then if you feel it necessary you can more to a hoste solution with minimal headache.  Just make sure that you have your own domain so that you don’t lose too many links that you have built.

Difference between the two. Hosted like going with a host like Hostgator and between a hosted, wordpress.com, blogger, etc

Advantages of the hosted service.

• Don’t need to have any programming experience
• Don’t need to worry about keeping the programs up-to-date
• Minimal backend work needed
• Usually lots of easy to installed themes, and styles
• Security, hosted services are typically very secure.

Disadvantages of hosted service

• You don’t have control of what is used for the site
• You can’t customize certain aspects of the site
• Even though there are plugins and extensions available what you can do with the site is limited.

Advantages of using a host

• You can pretty much put anything that you want online
• You have much great control of the way the site looks and interacts with your audience
• You can use the host for your FTP, email, and many other services that the hosted version does not have
• There are many “unlimited” hosts that allow you to store large amounts of data at no extra cost.

Disadvantages of using a host

• If you are not careful, you may find that the site is down more than it is up.
• Customer service may be a nightmare (Although Hostgator is an exception to this.  They have done everything they can to make my life on their servers enjoyable) .
• There may be bandwidth limitations.
• The cost can be huge if you have a popular site with little revenue as the bandwidth charges can get expensive.
• You are responsible for ensuring that your site is secure.

Conclusions
It really depends on what you are planning on using the site for.  If you are only interested in a content site or a personal site that you can communicate with family etc.  They a hosted service, or using many different hosted services to serve the purposes that you need for them. 

This can include services like Wordpress.com, Flickr.com blogger.com, etc.  If you are interested in having a custom site programmed, want to have a email address with your domain or want to have the choice of how the site works.  If you want to have full control over the type of content, visitors, the script on the site etc then you are going to be looking for something that is hosted.  The other thing that you have to remember is that if you want to ensure that you have FULL control over the content of the site then you want to fully control the host.  The hosted services typically have a TOS stating that they do not assume any risk if you lose everything.

Thoughts?

So you know what I think, what do you think?  Let me know in the comments below. 

Cheers, JM