I wrote my second post about two years ago, and in these two years the blog has achieve some readership ( about 250+ Google Reader subscribers, don't believe the number of subscribers reported by feedburner-- it's not accurate), hit reddit.com, hacker news, dzone, dotnetkicks and other news aggregator websites homepage a few times and help me collect my first cheque from Google. Not bad for a simple blog that doesn't even have a proper domain name.
But I think time has come for me to do some serious reflection on this blog. If this blog were to grow-- and if I were to continually invest in my blogging effort, mostly for the purpose of self entertainment and maybe a bit of publicity-- I would need to give the blog a proper URL, not a subdomain at blogspot.com. And also, I need a customizable backend and frontend, basically this means that I would have self-host a WordPress blog engine ( Sorry, .Net based blog engines such as blogengine.net are totally out of .question because the plugins are not as many and the hosting cost is substantially more expensive).
Now, let me list down the pros and cons of getting a new domain name and a new blogging engine:
Pro:
- More professional
- If I am not doing it now, it will be harder for me to do it next time.
- An SEO friendly URL has a greater chance of drawing in more traffic from search engines.
- Easier customization
Con
- I would lose my readership. Not everyone would bother to rebookmark or resubscribe, I know
- I would lose Google PageRank. I have to garden my blog from the start
- I would need to setup a lot of things
- Need to shell out at least RM135 per year for the blog ( about 40 USD per year)
- Lose the remaining Google Adsense earning
What do you think? Leave a comment here or vote at my blog!
