The Microcap Speculator

note: this post begins a series of posts analyzing the best practices of my fellow financial bloggers.

As long-term readers may recall, this blog began life on blogspot.com.  The price (free) couldn’t be beat, and the Blogger publishing system made it easy to get started.

After a year and a half, I began to question that decision.  Blogger became less and less stable, and Google’s customer service system was a big disappointment.  More importantly, I was putting a lot of work into the blog, and felt that I should be creating value in a domain I owned and controlled myself.

I had also heard great things about a publishing platform called WordPress.  After consulting with a number of fellow bloggers who were kind enough to offer their advice, I decided to host my own blog.  After registering my domain, I signed up for a hosting plan at Site5 that probably offered more muscle than I needed.  The cost: about $10/year for the domain, $5/month for shared hosting that included massive amounts of storage and all the bells and whistles.  An advertiser had just contacted me out of the blue and offered to pay far more than that for a text ad, so the decision was easy.

Moving the blog was fairly easy.  My new host had a service called fantastico that installed WordPress automatically, so I didn’t have to delve into any of the technical details.  WordPress also automatically imported my blogger posts (although some of the internal links were broken).  The most time consuming part was choosing a theme.  Unlike Blogger, which at the time had only a dozen or so options, there were hundreds of WordPress themes available, not to mention scores of plugins that extended its functionality.  For someone used to the spartan Blogger system, it was an embarassment of riches.

I made a few mistakes though.  I had a lot of problems getting my feed shifted over, although it should have been quite simple with feedburner.  Frustrated and impatient, I ended up deleting the old blogspot blog — big mistake.  I should have kept it with a link to the new site, or with a 301-redirect that can be set up using Blogger Custom Domains.  My rash move sent my pagerank to zero, and it took several months to build it back.  I also should have done a better job giving advance notice of the move, so readers would not be confused.  Finally, when selecting my domain name, I underestimated the confusion with the shlocky newsletter that was squatting on microcapspeculator.com.  Every month I get 2 or 3 emails complaining about that site, and I have nothing to do with it!

All in all, my move to a self-hosted blog has been positive.  Still, it is by no means the universal approach of top financial bloggers.  I took a look at the 65 top investment blogs listed at newsflashr, which replaced the list formerly kept at instantbull.com.

Surprisingly, 2 of the top 3 blogs were service-hosted — Barry Ritholz’s Big Picture (on typepad) and Michael Shedlock’s Global Economic Analysis (on blogger).  The rest of the top 10 appear to be self-hosted, except Brett Steenbarger’s Trader Feed (also on blogger).  I say “appear” because it is possible that a blog is service-hosted, but has a custom domain redirected to the service.  For blogs using this approach, you will not see “blogspot” or “typepad” in the URL even though the blog is hosted on one of those sites.

In the next tier — blogs ranked 11 through 35 — six were service-hosted, and nineteen appeared to be self-hosted.   The split was a dead heat for blogs 36 through 65, with fifteen service-hosted and fifteen self-hosted (including The Microcap Speculator).

Of the twenty-four service-hosted blogs in the newsflashr list, an overwhelming twenty-two were hosted on blogspot.  That’s not a huge surprise.  After all, blogspot is free — a main reason why this blog started life hosted there.   As mentioned above, typepad was represented at the one spot with Big Picture.  Tripod also garnered a slot, hosting Bob’s Advice at number 64.

Let’s get the discussion started.  Are you happy with blogspot/typepad?  Do you think that the cost and effort of self-hosting is worth it?  What were your experiences switching?  What tips do you have for your fellow bloggers?

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Here are a few reasonably-priced hosts if you are considering the switch.  All offer fantastico or another automatic script installer, more options and storage than you will ever need, and reasonable pricing.  Some also come with a free domain name registration.

Site 5 (the one I use)

Web Hosting Pad (I use this for a different site; both are fine)

BlueHost (I’ve heard good things but have never used)