First of all to me there are no mistakes. I do not fear mistakes. I fear only the absence of creative, constructive and corrective response to those mistakes. To me there is only experience. Here is my personal experience I consider as the most important thing besides writing great content. If you want to leave the amateur league and join the A bloggers here is what you have to consider.

So talking about my blog experience and certain things that I wouldn´t repeat with future blog projects there is mainly one thing that I want to share with the public: do not use shared hosting if you are at least a little bit serious about your blog project. This is a mistake I did and I don´t want you to experience it, too. I repeat: never ever make use of shared hosting.

Why is it so important to make use of a server instead? There are 2 main reasons besides having the complete freedom over your blog (The backside is, that you also need a lot of knowledge to administrate the server. Otherwise you should make use of a managed server or a geek.). The first reason is speed and scaling. The second and final aspect will be explained at the end of this posting.

The first reason why you should us a server

I followed every blog advice there was. I didn´t use any blogspot blog, I reserved my domain name before starting my blog, I made use of a decent theme and integrated many useful plug-ins to serve my needs and also my reader´s needs. Eventually I found a good hoster and bought a shared hosting platform for some bucks. Easy going I though by myself. Nevertheless I overlooked one very important thing: speed.

There is nothing in the world that can keep up with the speed of a server. 200 visitors a day will cause shared hosting mostly to crash. On a shared hosting server system there are around 100 (!) persons hosted sometimes even more. Imagine: 100+ persons on one server! On a server there is only one person: you. A server means speed. And speed is what your readers and even you desperately demand.

Hosted servers are simply lame. They lack speed and speed is key if you want to work with your blog and serve your readers. Without speed your blog goes down the drain because readers will flee from slow servers. Waiting up to 8 seconds or even more for one page to load is just unacceptable. During my time with shared hosting not only went my blog speed down, my blog was almost a pain to maintain and administrate, too. The lack of speed also affected the wordpress interface. It took sometimes up to 10 minutes (!) to publish one posting. With a server it takes seconds.

Another issue is that you face database limitations. Since the blogging software mostly makes use of SQL you have to have a database. And it will grow over time. After around 100 postings and around 300 comments your database takes some megabytes. Imagine that the 100 users on a shared hosting server use only 1 database per user. That makes 100 databases on one server. Imagine: 100!

So you want to shift from shared hosting to server hosting? I bet you want to! But then you have to suffer blogger´s pain again. I am not talking about administrating a server. No, that´s quite simple compared to the next step. I am talking about the migration process itself.

Migrating from a shared hosting service to a server is hard. There are many things you may overlook and miss while exporting your stuff to your new blog on your server. The most important things are your database, your plug-ins and your theme. The real thrill is the import of your old postings. Often the link structure changes significantly and therefore seriously affects your search engine ranking. But I haven´t finished yet. Let´s face the other important aspect you have to face.

The second reason why you must use a server

Have you ever heard of permalinks and permalinks structure yet? I you have – have you also heard about Apaches´s mod_rewrite module? And, finally, did you know that 99,9% of all shared hosting providers don´t offer mod_rewrite? To make a long story short: without mod_rewrite forget about permalinks. You have to make use of the “?=X� structure for your postings (which by the way looks also very ugly). This way you cannot make use of an important SEO technique if you use wordpress.

“But server administration is so complicated!� I hear you cry. Ok. Here is what I recommend. Spend some bucks on a geek that knows how to administer a server if you lack the knowledge. I would rather pay a geek 100$ a month than ever using shared hosting again.

Again, to make a long story short: without a server you stay in the amateur league of blogging – forever.

This posting is part of Daniel´s Blog Project on blog mistakes. Thank you for your invitation to this nice project Daniel. I appreciate it!