Captured from blogcn.com's homepage on July 21, 2004. Screenshot in courtesy of blogcn.com
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blogcn.com, the largest blogging hosting provider (like blogger.com), has been down for about 8 days.
Captured from blogcn.com's homepage on July 21, 2004. Screenshot in courtesy of blogcn.com
Massive bloggers were affected and became homeless. It breaks the update pace of bloggers and caused big problems in the blogsphere. I am using my RSS reader to pull RSS from other bloggers. 1/3 of them are hosted on blogcn.com and now, the source became unavailable.
To Host or Not
"Where to host my blog today?" is the question in many bloggers' mind. Many changed BSP (blogging service provider). When a service goes down, people have to think of ways of migrating it to another service. Sometimes they lose all the previous post. It will be heartbreaking.
I will NOT Host on BSP
I don't want to host my blog at any Blog Service Provider. Instead, I choose ISP (Internet Service Provider) to host my virtual host and run blogging software by myself.
The baseline is to keep the URL of my old article never change.
Run Your Blog Under Your Own Domain
I regret I didn't start my own domain earlier. My first homepage is hosted on Kali with URL http://www.kali.com.cn/myhome/wjs in 1997. The site does not provide free personal website service now so my site disappeared permentantly from the earth.
If I have had more money at that time, I may have started my own domain. (Actually, it is a matter of mindset. Everybody has money to have a nice dinner, which is enough for one year of domain hosting. Yes. In Shanghai, 30 RMB per person can be pretty good dinner already) The domain name is life long assert. I may change my server but the URL remains the same. Nobody noticed my server switch (first time, second time) or IP change, since my URL remains. What if I switch a BSP, for example, from www.blogcn.com to www.blogbus.com or others. The URL changes. Readers get lost and old links break. Linkage is called by somebody to be currency on the Internet. The more links you have, the more Internet Assert you have.
To register a .com domain name has dropped to 6.95 USD at GoDaddy.com. It is not expensive.
Considered to Host Your Site at Home?
Technical guys like to host a website on personal computer at home. Run is doing so. Hacky also did so. I did it too at early stage. Later, I gave up. I explain it to people this way: "When I start it for the first week, it is exciting. After two week, I started to wonder the meaning of running the server, consuming electricity power and sending out noise and heat. Just to serve the 20-50 visits per day (30% comes from myself)?
At last, I decided to put the hot potato in a cheap server room. 380 RMB is not bad for me (at companycn.com)
Start Your Own Domain and Hosted, Blogcn Users
I suggest people who suffer from the pause of service of blogcn to register a personal domain rightaway and host your blog under your own name. Since blogging is part of personal identity on the Internet, so should your URL. Then find a cheap hosting provider and install blogging software like MovableType. Then you are sure that it will follow you for a long time.
Resources for the Move
Posted by Jian Shuo Wang at July 21, 2004 10:41 PM
Copyright: You are free to redistribute this work, as long as you keep this disclaimer
and this link: http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20040721_blog_to_host_it_or_not.htm
there is also a compromise just like what CNBlog.org and I did: storing the articles on blogger.com and using the external webhosting to publish them.
I think it better than to run a whole blogprogramm on a ISP server, cuz there r no ISP in china, who is stabler than Google server.
you can register your domain at 1and1.com for $5.99/year. btw, what's the best ISP in Shanghai(China)?
Posted by: kaixuan (external link) on July 23, 2004 12:43 PMI would rank http://hotsales.net. Disclaimer: I have to let you know that I was the one of the four founders of this company and it grows to 300 employee company. I do think the service is good, but judgement is yours (since I have disclose my relationship with the company to you.
Posted by: Jian Shuo Wang (external link) on July 23, 2004 2:59 PMYou think you've seen the best web pages? I used to think so,too...until I ran into this crazy,amazing site! http://durrel.net/map3.html http://durrel.net/scotia.html http://durrel.net/
Have fun surfing on it! :)
It was fun visiting here. Wishing you a great day! http://www.dontevercallmyname.com , http://www.dontevercallmyname2.com
Posted by: Peter Back (external link) on August 8, 2005 5:59 PM