Recommend a Blog hosting site

[wagsea6b]

Hi all,

We are getting close to setting off on our great sailing adventure and as it seems to be de rigueur these days we would like to post a blog for friends, family and interested parties to follow.

I've followed the "Best Blog" thread with interest (and have added many to my book marks) but for all you bloggers out there I ask, "which blog hosting site do you recommend?"

My wife and I are computer literate but by no means "programmers." Would like something easy and affordable that can do all the cool stuff like show your position, link to Facebook, etc. An example of one of our favorites is SV Totem's blog Sailing Totem.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions or recommendations.

Thanks!
Wags and Paula
S/V Gadabout

[SailRedemption]

Originally Posted by wagsea6b

Hi all,

We are getting close to setting off on our great sailing adventure and as it seems to be de rigueur these days we would like to post a blog for friends, family and interested parties to follow.

I've followed the "Best Blog" thread with interest (and have added many to my book marks) but for all you bloggers out there I ask, "which blog hosting site do you recommend?"

My wife and I are computer literate but by no means "programmers." Would like something easy and affordable that can do all the cool stuff like show your position, link to Facebook, etc. An example of one of our favorites is SV Totem's blog Sailing Totem.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions or recommendations.

Thanks!
Wags and Paula
S/V Gadabout

You can use http://builtwith.com to enter whoevers website and it will tell you who hosts it, and what other plug-ins and framework programs they use..

Sent from my VS986 using Tapatalk

[wagsea6b]

Originally Posted by SailRedemption

You can use BuiltWith Technology Lookup to enter whoevers website and it will tell you who hosts it, and what other plug-ins and framework programs they use..

Sent from my VS986 using Tapatalk

Wow, that is super helpful! Thanks!!!

[Jon Neely]

We started with blogger but just today did the switch to wordpress. We are very happy with the results. Svprism.com

Gives us room to actually have a website vs just a blog.


Sent from my iPhone using Cruisers Sailing Forum

[oldragbaggers]

We have been hosted by Go daddy for years, but use WordPress for the blog itself. Not really cheap but we've owned our .com name for years, I won't give it up and am too lazy to move it and start over. You can do a free site on Google (biblically). We've got a site reserved there too in case I get sick of paying Go daddy, and also free ones at sailboats.com but their site wasn't very versatile.

[mitchpierce]

I'm a retired tech CEO. Have used Wordpress,etc, but for our journey which began May, 2015, I found simplicity along with almost freeware to be best. I built a godaddy website using their tool websitebuilder (up in 30mins) and linked a free blogger blog (google's blog) to it.. Have no need to update the website and can update the blog from my iPhone's blogger app in seconds with a very weak wifi signal or minimal data when using cellular or satphone connection. Check out website and blog at Home. Website links to breezenlife.blogger.com. Have had some great experiences and lessons along the thornless path so far that I'd be willing to share.

[Tessellate]

I'd recommend wordpress.com. A quick intro on wordpress.com vs wordpress.org - Wordpress is blogging software - wordpress.com runs a free version of it that is ad supported (some small text ads may run on your blog), and wordpress.org is the full powered version of the software - use any plugins you like, customize your site more, and no ads.

Wordpress.com is good for getting started because it's free, and you can always transfer your blog to a wordpress.org blog later if you decide you want more customization. And wordpress.com still has plenty of great looking themes (templates) and decent number of plugins/customization (post to facebook, contact us functionality, embed custom html code like for a position tracker, etc).

You may want to pay for a domain (so you don't have a wordpress.com/mysite URL), which is about $12/year via Google Domains, plus $13/year to Wordpress for the domain mapping.

Whatever you do please don't do blogger.com / Blogspot. Blogspot was popular back in the day but isn't being updated anymore and its templates are pretty ugly. The sail blogs I see on blogspot are pretty difficult to read. It's free, but so is wordpress.com which has much better features.

[Stu Jackson]

Whatever you do, please, please, please, don't use a dark background with white lettering. No one can/will read it. I have no idea why folks do that. Reminds me of the time I called my office, and couldn't get through. The receptionist didn't last long.

[mbfisher61]

Definitely Wordpress (as I shamefully tout my own blog). They offer online classes which are really pretty good and their customer service is top notch.

Namasté,
Marci
S/V FNR
www.zenonaboat.com

[HappyMdRSailor]

WOWWWW!!!
New CF'r Jackpot...

Welcome Wags and Paula, Mitch and Marci !

[oldragbaggers]

Originally Posted by mitchpierce

I'm a retired tech CEO. Have used Wordpress,etc, but for our journey which began May, 2015, I found simplicity along with almost freeware to be best. I built a godaddy website using their tool websitebuilder (up in 30mins) and linked a free blogger blog (google's blog) to it.. Have no need to update the website and can update the blog from my iPhone's blogger app in seconds with a very weak wifi signal or minimal data when using cellular or satphone connection. Check out website and blog at Home. Website links to breezenlife.blogger.com. Have had some great experiences and lessons along the thornless path so far that I'd be willing to share.

This sounds like a viable solution to the problem I am having which is that Facebook will not let me link my blog posts from my main website to my FB page. I can link to posts in my blogger page though. It sounds like maybe this might be a good workaround. Would definitely be interested in more specifics.

[b_ohare]

Originally Posted by wagsea6b

Hi all,

We are getting close to setting off on our great sailing adventure and as it seems to be de rigueur these days we would like to post a blog for friends, family and interested parties to follow.

I've followed the "Best Blog" thread with interest (and have added many to my book marks) but for all you bloggers out there I ask, "which blog hosting site do you recommend?"

My wife and I are computer literate but by no means "programmers." Would like something easy and affordable that can do all the cool stuff like show your position, link to Facebook, etc. An example of one of our favorites is SV Totem's blog Sailing Totem.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions or recommendations.

Thanks!
Wags and Paula
S/V Gadabout

PM me and I'll be happy to try and build something for you that has similar features as Sailing Totem for free. (If you want your own domain name, you'll have to purchase that; they are < $10/year but I'll show you where you can get the first year for $0.99). At some point, I'm going to build my own and so this would help push to get me started

[xslim]

I'm a tech guy so a bit different for me: I run 3 blogs using GitHub's Jekyll and host images on Flickr (1 TB for free)
The blogs are:
- My blog about software coding - taras kalapun
- My GF blog about her design - Emily Vernon - Home
- Travel blog I'm trying to do - Restless Point

[Canibul]

I'm still on Blogspot, mainly because it was easy eight years ago when I started, and it's remained simple to use and the link to Picasa for the photos has worked well. Is it difficult to move to something like Wordpress? I'm having all kinds of problems with busted links on old posts as Image Shack goes all chickenshirt on us. I used them in the early days.
Now, 342 posts into it, I'm getting the hang of Blogspot but I'd like to get away from all things Google if I can.

[Schooner Chandlery]

Wordpress is a pretty good deal--free themes and low cost themes all available. There's also a good online community at the wordpress.org for support to all users. You can get a free account at wordpress.com but it's limited in terms of themes, plugins and what you can do in the long run. For the short haul it might be just fine.

There's always sailblogs, too. You'll pay for that though.

In our case, in 2006, when we moved out of our house to begin the rebuild of the boat on the opposite coast, we went ahead and moved everything to a $20/mo virtual private server. We'd been hosting our own business web server, mail server, and PBX system since 1998 so it was a natural to go with a VPS that could give us the same level of control. So we have our business email server, a PBX system that also works like skype for us, a couple business web sites, personal blogs, and sundry other things all for $20/mo. We're technophiles--so it's all good as far as we're concerned.

Alternative hosts for wordpress include Bluehost, Hostgator (or something like that), as well as godaddy that someone else mentioned.