Seven Ways We Make it Easy To Run a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog
By choosing to run a free blog at wordpress.com you’re essentially giving up control of that blog to a third party. This won’t matter for many blogs, but if the blog in question is your main business blog, wordpress.com isn’t the place for it.
Self hosting your own blog gives you back that control, but what if you don’t have the time nor the technical expertise to exercise that control? What then?
Our service makes it possible for anyone to enjoy the benefits of a self hosted blog. At the Power Blog Service we remove any objections you may have to self-hosting. Here’s how.
Challenge 1 : You have to find a good host for your blog
We host your blog on LiquidWeb servers. LiquidWeb are excellent web hosts with 100% network uptime and heroic support. This means we have an enormous team behind us supporting your web hosting needs.
If you use a low cost (but popular) host like Hostgator or Blue Host you will get cheap hosting, but if and when your blog becomes suddenly popular, you may find low cost services, despite their promises of unlimited resources, unable to assist you.
At the Power Blog Service we won’t shut your site down if it grows and becomes popular, nor do we overburden our servers.
Instead we monitor your site’s popularity and when it becomes too large and resource hungry for our standard hosting, we’ll talk to you about moving your blog to a dedicated server. Once that is agreed we’ll move it for you. We provide you with a full and seamless service for your blog.
Solution
We host your blog for you.
Challenge 2:You need to upgrade wordpress
The latest versions of WordPress include a one click upgrade facility which means upgrading is easier than ever. However, before you click the upgrade button, you have to do the following
- Make a backup of all your site data
- Visit plugin and theme author websites and see what each author advises regarding the WordPress upgrade
- Upgrade all your plugins as per author instructions
- Disable all plugins
- Upgrade WordPress
Many people don’t bother with each of the steps above, including not backing up their data. This can be a problem if the one click upgrade fails to work.
We do the upgrades for you, outside your business hours, so your blog doesn’t miss any visitors. What’s more, because you aren’t having to do your WordPress upgrades, you don’t have to back your blog up or read the about plugins. It’s all done.
We test each new WordPress release and if the upgrades cause a problem we revert back to the previous version until the problem is fixed.
Short Answer
We do all your WordPress upgrades.
Challenge 3: You have to update all your plugins
Plugins have a habit of frequently going out of date. At the Power Blog Service barely a day passes when we don’t have a plugin or two to update.
Once again, WordPress have made this simple for you to do yourself. However, automatic plugin upgrades, like automatic WordPress upgrades can go wrong. The WordPress forums often have posts from people seeking help with blog problems after automatic upgrades. See below :
Short Answer
We do all plugin upgrades for you. We support only the most reliable plugins and quickly deal with any problems resulting from these. You do nothing.
Challenge 4 : You need technical knowledge
If you use our service you won’t need any technical knowledge at all. We take care of the technical installation and maintenance issues as previously explained. We create your Wordpres database and all accounts that you need to run it smoothly.
When it comes to posting effective and attractive blog posts, we provide you
with detailed tutorials. For example the very best ways to host images, manipulate images and place them effectively in your blog.
Short Answer
We provide training for all aspects of blogging.
Challenge 5 :You need to deal with spam
We set up spam filtering for you so you mostly only need to deal with real comments. And that’s not just the spam in your blog.
We also advise on the best way to deal with email spam and for a small added cost we can set up your email to limit your spam there too as well as provide a safe location for all your email.
Short Answer
We set things up so comment spam is absolutely minimised. Optionally you can also have email spam dealt with too as an add-on extra.
Challenge 6 : You need to run backups
The Power Blog Service performs backups, at two levels; your WordPress installation is backup up daily and the database that contains all your blog posts and any comments s backed up twice a dayu. If you need to recover for any reason that we can restore your blog as of the last backup.
Short Answer
You don’t need to rrun backups coz we do.
Challenge 7 : Your blog will go down under a traffic spike
We can mitigate the likelihood of downtime to a large extent by showing you how to host your images and video at Amazon, and by using caching and database tuning, and if your blog becomes very successful we’ll help you move onto dedicated servers
So in summary, if you want the freedom of self hosted WordPress and no technical issues then the Power Blog Service can help.
Short Answer
We’ll move your blog when it becomes popular and talk to you about the added costs of a dedicated server through Liquidweb. In the meantime, any spikes are load balanced on our server network.
But I still want to run my blog all by myself on low cost hosting
If you enjoy dealing with the technicalities and have the time to do so, then Bluehost and Hostgator are two low cost providers of WordPress hosting.