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Since restarting my blog and encouraging readers to message me if they have any questions. I’ve been asked “Is going self-hosted really worth it?” countless times.

Every time I get asked this my short answer is “absolutely”. 

If you’re serious about blogging or wanting to work with brands or PRs you should 100% be self-hosted. If you can be – you should be a self-hosted blog from day one. So let’s delve into why.

First, what is hosting?

Having a self-hosted site is like owning your own home. You make all the decisions and have full control of your site.

Hosting has the advantage of giving you everything you need in one place: the hosting, the domain registration, the maintenance, security and normally offers support for its users. 

It’s often a great option for bloggers.

Non-self-hosted sites are often created on wordpress.com or blogger. You’ll struggle to build and monetising your blog if it’s not self-hosted because you’re limited by the tools the service provides, you’re limited in what you can create.

Reasons Why You Should Go Self-Hosted

You get to decide how your website looks

On a self-hosted blog, the sky is the limit. If you are on WordPress, you will have access to tens of thousands of themes for your blog. If you can’t find any that you like, you can buy them from a third-party site like Creative Market. 

This means that you get to pick a website theme that fits best represents you and your brand and if it’s still not right you can tweak everything about it.

There are endless styling options, and if you are technically savvy you can code in your own styling really easily. But if you are not a coder, that won’t stop you there are still 1000’s of areas that are easily customisable. 

You get access to thousands of plugins

Besides the large number of themes you can choose from, you can always install plugins to help improve your site for you and your readers. WordPress has over 30,000 plugins for you to choose from, most of which are free.

The functionality of your blog and your readers’ experience of your site can be vastly improved with a few key plugins. But these plugins are only available on a self-hosted blog!

These plugins allow you to set up your site to look the way you want visually, without you having to mess with the code. But there are also lots of plugins that will improve your site on a technical level, without you having to know any code. 

There are plugins that will allow access to more SEO options, increase your site speed and quickly access your analytics data.

These sometimes vital plugins are not accessible to free blogger

You can have custom URLs

For example, my custom domain name is www.billiegeena.com. If, however, your blog is on a free hosted platform such as WordPress.com or Blogger, the platform name forms part of your URL, like this: www.billiegeena.wordpress.com.

Not only is this a telltale sign that you’re running a blog on a free platform, but the long and bulky URL just doesn’t look as good. 

You will have more opportunities to monetize 

Often free hosted blogging platforms limit how you can monetize your blog. Brands and PRs won’t work with sites that are free hosted or have URLs like www.billiegeena.wordpress.com as these sites don’t have any link value. 

Free hosted sites only have the DA of the hosting platform but do not pass on any authority to the pages they link to. So when you are free hosted it looks like you have a massive (normally 90+ DA) but in reality, it’s closer to 0. 

Many brands and PRs work with bloggers to get links for themselves (or their clients), links help them rank better but they want these to be authoritative. I’ve got a whole blog post explaining how you can build your DA. 

In addition to not being able to build your DA,  free hosted platforms will also often display ads on your site that you have no control over.

You get more SEO benefits

I couldn’t write a blog post without talking about my favourite subject – SEO – you need it, to rank on Google. I’ve got loads of blog posts about this which you can find here. 

But, let’s look at why being self-hosted is better for SEO. 

Self-hosted sites allow you to optimize your content for search engines in a much more efficient way. You are able to edit the meta titles and descriptions, so you can entice potential readers from Google. 

You can also download plugins like Yoast or Rankmath, which will give you loads more SEO options. 

Also, a unique URL will help you do better on google in the long run too. 

How to choose a hosting provider?

When I was looking for a hosting provider, I spent hours researching and reading about it. The first is to find a host and the second is to choose a platform, that suits you. You aren’t just limited to WordPress, you could go with Blogger, Wix, Squarespace and there are loads more. I personally prefer WordPress as you can do more with it. 

Choosing a platform should reflect your goals, so think about what you want your site to be and then research, research, research. 

I chose Lyrical Host as my provider, they have loads of great facilities but the reviews of the customer service are what sold them to me. I used to be with Go Daddy, and I had a nightmare with their customer service a couple of years ago. So this was something really important to me. 

You can find more details about their hosting here | Affiliate Link
I also have a cheeky discount code if you fancy saving 10% on your plan. Use code: BillieGeena10

Whatever you decide, the most important thing is that it works for you and your needs.