I generally recommend that they use WordPress and host it on their own site — usually in a subdirectory on their site’s domain, e.g., example.com/blog, or perhaps on a subdomain, e.g., blog.example.com.

There are several reasons I lean toward hosting your own blog on your own site:

1. Reliability and Safety: I dislike, in general, the idea of having your material dependent on a third-party service where the security and reliability of your blog is at the mercy of that third party. A few years ago one of the major hosted blogging services closed up shop — unexpectedly and unnanounced — and stole away in the night. All of the bloggers who had been using that service found their blogs gone with no backups available and no way to re-create their work elsewhere. With your own copy of WordPress running on your own site, your blog is totally portable — you can host it anywhere you wish, and you can easily set it up elsewhere if your hosting disapppear That’s provided you have a backup, of course — when my clients host with me, there’s always a backup available, because I run a cron job that backs up all the databases nightly, and my hosting provider runs daily backups, as well. So none of my clients will ever find their site, or their blog, gone with no backup. All of the remotely hosted blogging platforms have a terms of service (TOS) that disclaims any responsibility for your material.
2. Link Juice: Assuming you do a good job writing your blog, and it attracts inbound links from other sites or blogs, links to your blog at example.com/blog are likely to help the site as whole rank well in the search engines, whereas a link to yourblog.blogspot.com isn’t going to have the same effect.
3. Branding: When your blog is hosted on your own domain, people who visit and read your blog can’t help but be aware of the rest of your site. But when your blog is at yourblog.blogspot.com, visitors might have no idea that you even have a site of your own, even if you add links to your site in the blog sidebar.
4. Flexibility: WordPress has a lot of functionality “out of the box,” and much more available through a variety of free plug-ins. With the remotely hosted services, you can only do what they allow.

With that said, I’ve recently been exploring Blogger, the blogging platform now owned by Google, and I have to say I’m pretty impressed. There’s more flexibility and functionality available than I was aware of, and the set-up is even faster and easier than WordPress, which is famous for its 5-minute installation. The WYSIWYG editor in Blogger for writing posts seems to be a little easier to use than WordPress’s. And Google loves it own blog service — A blog that I set up there had its first post found and crawled by GoogleBot the very same day I posted it.

Nevertheless, I shall continue recommending to clients that they host their own blog on their site. I think the advantages of self-hosting far outweigh the advantages of hosting on Blogger or any other blogging service.

I needed to set up a MySQL database for a client recently. The client hosts their website with a large and well-known hosting company, which advertises MySQL available with all hosting packages. It should have taken just a few minutes to create the database and assign the db username and password, and then I could get on with the backend programming for the site. Several days and several billable hours later, I was just getting started.

First, I logged into the client’s hosting control panel and looked for the “MySQL” or “Database” option. No problem, that was easy enough to find. There was a link to “Activate MySQL” for the account. I thought that a little odd — most of the time, hosting accounts that have MySQL available simply have it available, no “activation” required. But okay…. I clicked the “Activate MySQL” link, then received a message that MySQL wasn’t available and the account would have to upgraded to a package that included MySQL. E-mail the client, explain the situation, tell them they need to upgrade their hosting account. It turns out that this host’s current packages all include MySQL, but older legacy accounts never had MySQL added to the available options.

Some days later, the client has upgraded their account to one of the newer hosting packages, which does include MySQL. I log back in to the control panel, activate MySQL, make note of the host, username, and password to use for database connections, then look for a link to phpMyAdmin to access the database. No phpMyAdmin anywhere, but the knowledgebase included instructions for downloading and installing phpMyAdmin. Wow, even the low-end $4/month hosting accounts at GoDaddy include phpMyAdmin already installed and ready to use.

I wouldn’t have to waste time installing phpMyAdmin if I could access the MySQL server through a secure shell, so I checked the account’s features for connecting via telnet or ssh. I didn’t find any information on that, so I tried a few random-but-likely ssh connections, but no go. Apparently the account has no telnet or ssh ability. So off I go to download phpMyAdmin.

I downloaded phpMyAdmin, uploaded it to the server, configured the connection settings, and tried to load up phpMyAdmin. I got a variety of “access denied” messages, all pretty worthless.

I’ve only installed phpMyAdmin myself a couple of times, and I wasn’t positive I had it configured correctly, so I decided to just use the connection string and try a database connection in a test page on the client’s site. I still got “access denied” errors, but this time the error message was more useful: The hostname for the database in the error messages was not the hostname specified in my db connection string. I double-checked and triple-checked the hostname specified in the hosting control panel and made sure I had it correct in the connection string, but I kept getting this same error. So I finally decided I needed to contact the host for technical support.

I hate calling tech support on the phone, because it invariably involves being put on hold for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, so I looked for a tech support contact form or e-mail link. No e-mail link, but I did find a form. Unfortunately, the form required that I enter the last 4 digits of the credit card number associated with the account. This is a client’s account, not my own, and I don’t happen to have the client’s credit card number, so I couldn’t use the form — even though I’m logged into the account’s control panel using the username and password associated with the account.

Looks like I have to resort to the telephone after all. I dial the tech support number and I get put on hold for about 45 minutes. I put my phone on speaker and tried to get some other work done while waiting, but every couple of minutes a robotic voice would issue from the speaker telling me how important my call was — repeatedly interrupting my concentration and making it virtually impossible to get any work done while waiting on hold. This is exactly why I hate calling tech support.

Finally, after 45 minutes of this, I get a live person who takes down the necessary information, puts me on hold while he checks into the situation, and then tells me that the database was activated on the wrong server and he would fix that but it would take 6 hours for the correction to “take.” I don’t get this at all — if he fixed it, why is there a six-hour delay? Nevermind, I was glad that the problem was identified, so I thanked him and hung up.

By now it’s well past my normal working hours, and the database is supposed to take 6 hours to be fixed, so I closed up shop for the day. The next morning, my connection script is working, and phpMyAdmin is working, and I’m finally able to start work on the client’s database.

Fortunately for me, I charge this client on an hourly basis, and you better believe they were billed for every minute I spent attempting to get their database set up and working, including the 45 minutes I spent on hold listening to that irritating robotic voice telling me how important my call was. If they had been with a better hosting company, they would have saved about 4 billable hours on their last invoice.