GUIDE TO BLOGGER

Friday, April,22, 2010

Spam blogs deletion & self-hosted blogs

This post was inspired by 2 emails, one regarding the widespread

deletion of blogspot.com blogs and one regarding web hosting.

I myself have had 3 blogs related of which one probably was

because it was a song, music and video blog which had many

embedded Youtube videos. From a quick reading of Blogger Buzz

A quick note about music blog removals, it was probably because

of Blogger.com enforcing its Terms of Service as they relate to their

DMCA policy. However, if so, I should have received a notification.

Anybody who received such notifications should file a

DMCA counter-notification. As that was a minor blog and the

other 2 were just blogs for demonstration of some third party templates,

I did not bother to appeal or to try to reverse the deletion, which

probably will be a very difficult or tedious process.

However, I do have quite a number of more important blogs including

Blogger Tips and Tricks which have a not insignificant number of

embedded Youtube videos and thus perhaps susceptible to sudden

deletion, thus thinking of self-hosted blogs.

Why self-hosted blogs? These I believe will not be susceptible to deletion

as my earlier assumption that blogs using custom domain would be

immune to such deletions have proven to be false hope. However,

it has come to my notice that some blogs using custom domain and

thus hosted by Blogger.com had also been deleted. Further,

Blogger.com will be stopping support for those using the old classic

Blogger template, publishing via FTP and hosting the blog

themselves by March 26 2010 (seeImportant Note to FTP Users).

This means that if you are very worried about your blog being

suddenly deleted, you may have to consider self-hosted blogs

with other non-Blogger.com blogging platform likeWordpress.com,

etc. I myself may consider starting a self-hosted Wordpress.com

blog for testing, learning with the possibility of making it long term.

Thus my interest in the second email which was about web hosting

by doteasy.com which offered free web hosting as well as an

“unlimited” hosting plan at $9.95 per month with unlimited storage,

bandwidth and all the bells and whistles I possibly may need.

Further, with this coupon code 1003BPM, I can get a dotcom

domain for $7.95 (as at time of posting, but may change).

Now the first email from Chris of Blogger Victim who is campaigning

to try to persuade Blogger.com to modify their blog deletion policies

and methods. Do pop over to their blog if you want to find out more

about what is happening and if you want to assist them in their

campaign.