Having a Self Hosted website, vs Blogspot

If you’ve ever considered building or getting your own website, you’ve probably compared building your own site to getting one from a source like Blogger. Doing either of these things comes with their own sets of pros and cons, but what do they look like when matched up against each other? Is one the better, more profitable idea than the other?

SEO Pros and Cons

As mostly everyone in the internet money-making game knows, the possibilities are endless with SEO when it comes to using SEO on a self-hosted site. You are free to optimize in your content as well as behind the scenes in the coding. Blogger is a tad more tricky, but it isn’t too hard to get a firm grip on how your blog does in terms of SEO.

HTML5 and Dynamic Appearances

When self hosting your own site, the results are really up to you when it comes to how your site turns out in the long run. HTML5 and dynamic appearances/customized landing pages are merely up to you, and they can possibly be implemented if you wish for them to. Blogger, however, is more limited. Google recently rolled out 5 new “dynamic views” that allows its users to add more interested features to their blogs with animation and interactivity. This could bode well for certain types of bloggers. For example, users with photo blogs can take advantage of the new dynamic view, “Snapshot.”

Plugin Support

Blogger supports different “plugins” and “addons” commonly known as widgets. Widgets can really take an ordinary Blogger site to new heights if the right ones are used. Of course, plugins and addon functionality is endless with a self hosted site. This is especially true if the site is WordPress-powered, or it’s using an equivalent.

Facebook iFrame Support

If you decide to build your own site, you can design it to where it can fluidly work with the Facebook iFrame platform. Blogger on the other hand may cause trouble with different layouts and making them resize to different dimensions. This may be a feature you want to steer clear of if you plan to make Blogger your primary solution for hosting.

Multi Platform Support

If you plan to cater to users that visit your site on different platforms, your website is going to need to easily syndicate to various resolutions and dimensions. Of course, as previously mentioned, a self hosted site can easily be designed to fluidly work with resizing. The possibility for this is merely left in the hands of the person that codes the website. Blogger is also pretty easy to navigate via different devices as well. Blogger offers different apps on various platforms such as Android or iOS for viewing blogs. This is only really useful to users that write the blog. Blogger’s site is also optimized to adapt to different platform dimensions, so this should rarely ever be a problem for your viewers and audience.

Pricing/Costs

A self hosted site can come with many costs, but these can be controlled if you shop around and only use features that will benefit you in the longrun. A hosting package for a self hosted site might run around $5/month, and that cane even include the cost of domain. If you don’t purchase anything else, this can only cost you around $60/year. On the other hand, Blogger is completely free. As you can see, the more you financially put into your online efforts with your web businesses or ventures, the greater the outcome.

Converting Traffic

When it comes to converting traffic, it is all merely up to the site/blog owner and their efforts to make that happen. A self hosted site might look a little more professional to users, and it may sway them to convert more easily. This is especially true if using a .com domain. These often send a positive message to audiences.

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