I have been asked many times in the past: “Why are you such an evangelist for WordPress?”

The truth is that I’m not that big of a WordPress fan… At least not the WordPress hosted service. What I am a huge fan of is the WordPress platform as a self-hosted blog, sales system, content manager, membership site, etc… The options are limitless.

The WordPress system, hosted on your own server, gives you more flexibility than any other blog engine out there.

• Its an easy install from cpanel for those who are not too ftp savvy.
• There are tons of plugins to make it do what you want
• There are literally millions of free templates out there for your site
• Templates are easily customized
• The learning curve for using it is short and not too steep, so even a beginner can pick it up quickly
• There are new things being developed for it, constantly

Sure there are other options. Google’s Blogger platform is also fairly flexible and easy to use, but the options aren’t near as vast as WordPress. There are tons of free and paid sites out there that you can blog on, but none even come close to WordPress on your own server.

First off, if its on your own web host, you are in control of your content. You don’t have a site manager telling you they think that something is inappropriate and closing you down… And, usually, its not for porn or malware that they shut you down… Its for selling things from your blog!

For some reason these hosted sites don’t want you to use your blog as a sales tool very much. An occasional pitch may get by, but if you are constantly pitching products and posting affiliate links all over the place, they tend to take offense to it.

Sometimes you can get by with it for a long time. You may never get shut down. But, would you even want to take that chance? Lose all of your posts taht you worked so long on? All of your subscribers? I know… some of that can happen if you self-host.

The downsides of self-hosting your WordPress blog.

• If you are on shared hosting, your content is moderated… so stick to clean and legal stuff
• The server could crash… make sure someone is backing it up regularly
• You are more vulnerable to hacker attacks, sometimes

The bottom lines is that you can use a service to host your blog and you’ll probably be alright. But, if you self-host with WordPress as your content management system, the possibilities are endless. If you have an idea for some type of function for your blog, there is probably a WordPress plugin out there to make it happen. WordPress, simply stated… Is the way to go.