So what is the best blog host??

I'm going to post a little nuggest from Yaro Starak's newsletter on blogging traffic. He blogs over at http://www.blogtrafficschool.com/blog/. I think his point is valid...anyone had a similar experience? To think that I could log onto Solo In Chicago someday and it could be gone...

I'll tell you a story about Steve. Steve is a niche blogger. He set up lots of little blogs on all kinds of topics (niches) aiming to make a few dollars from each blog by placing Google AdSense advertisements on them. Google pays you when someone clicks on the ads. After a few months he did really well and built up his income. None of his blogs had a lot of traffic, but they got enough from search engines that each blog earned between $1 and $10 per day. In total he earned over $2000 per month from his blogs - not a bad effort. One day he turned on his computer and all his blogs had gone. Disappeared. Vanished without a trace... What happened you ask? He was using one Blogger.com account to manage his blogs and Blogger.com determined that what he was doing was violating their terms of service. They thought all his blogs were what are called "splogs" - SPAM blogs. Splogs are blogs set up to get traffic to other sites. They are usually automatically generated and the owners have no intention of producing a useful website - they just want to get traffic. Essentially they are the SPAM of the blogging world. Steve contacted the support staff at Blogger.com to explain that his sites were not SPAM sites but it was difficult to convince them and he never got his blogs reactivated. Overnight he lost his regular $2000 per month income in one hit.

OWN YOUR BLOG

If Steve had hosted his blogs on WordPress on his own servers with his own domains this simply would not have happened. It may cost a bit more upfront to buy the domain names and rent the server space (WordPress itself is free) but the security and control makes it worthwhile.