Why Linda Ikeji's free blog could be a risky investment

For most people who are used to blogging, blogger.com is one of the best places to start a blog and this is because apart from the easy to use and wonderful platform which it offers new bloggers, it is also free to start a blog there and not pay anything for web hosting. All a person needs to start blogger with blogger is just a simple Google registration and then setting up a blog at blogger.com. The person's blog home page will then be listed and publicly available at name.blogspot.com.

There are many people who own and run blogs at blogspot.com but one question we need to be asking is whether there ever comes a time when using a free blog with blogger should come to an end. Does a blogger ever outgrow free blogging? Should a blogger keep blogging at blogspot?

Ofcourse you've probably heard about blogger celebs like Linda Ikeji, one of the top bloggers we've got in Nigeria. She really does have a nice cute blog hosted by Google for free at lindaikeji.blogspot.com. I quite appreciate the fact that she's chosen a niche for herself and it doing real fine reporting news, events and entertainment gists. I myself would have started a blog with blogger but after reading many stories about blogger deleted blogs and shared advertising commissions, I decided to just go ahead an pay for hosting my own blog with Bluehost.

Most blogs hosted at blogspot.com is hosted on the blogger platform and is owned by Google and this means that the bloggers or blog writers who actually write on those free blogs do not own the blog but rather it is Blogger that owns it. This means that anytime they feel that your blog contains content that goes against their terms of service, they are free to delete or suspend it even without telling you. The blogger actually owns the content he/she writes but blogger would not remind you to backup your blog even though they don't stop you from doing so.

One of the most important things to do while running a blog with blogger or on any website is to periodically do a backup for your blog. Web hosts like blogger can at times simply shut down a blog and delete all the blog posts you've written and that brings that free blog to an end.

Also, since most free blogs being hosted by blogger normally come with a sub domain name linked to blogspot, it means that when such blogspot sub domain names get deleted, the blog cannot be moved and hence the blogger would also lost future traffic from visitors. One cool thing to do if you are still blogging on blogspot is to register your own domain name so that even when the website gets deleted or suspended, you can always point your domain name to another web host and redirect old urls to your new urls whether on wordpress or other blogging platform you have with your new web host.

The worst thing that can happen to someone who has written a lot of blog posts with blogger is to wake up one day and find out that your hard work has just disappeared, thanks to the free blogging service. It would even be much worse if that blog had not being backed up.

Last time I checked, the number of pages already indexed by Google for Linda Ikeji's blog was already over 23,000 pages and this means she's probably written and published a lot of posts on her blog. The question then remains as to why she hasn't moved to a paid blog yet.

Things like malware, copyright content and illegal content can lead to a blog to be deleted on blogger and who knows what else hackers are capable of when they specifically target a blog?

It would have been safer if she at least registered a custom domain name for her blog like a dotcom that identifies with her brand rather than keep using the free sub domain name and hosting.

If a person has invested a lot of their time and energy in running a successful blog at blogger, one of the things they'd need to do is to at least have a custom domain name so that no matter what happens, your blog's traffic will never be lost.

Well, I think her blog is safe as long as she doesn't go against blogger's terms of service but who knows if blogger will keep supporting free blogs in the future.