Ask HN: Tumblr vs self-hosted blog? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tumblr vs self-hosted blog?

3 pointsmsencenb4 comments

Want to start blogging but was wondering if you guys had any personal experiences with going tumblr vs something self hosted (aka wordpress).

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It depends on what is more important to you: do your blog have to be ultimately easy, instantly working and that's all. Or do you need ultimate control over it and to have your data where you decide to. In the first case go for Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress.com, Blogger..., in the second case go for a self hosted blog like Wordpress.org, Jekyll, fugitive, DotClear...

And since you ask for personal experience: I've always prefered to host my own data so I'm in the second case, also I've almost always written my blogging engines myself (fugitive is the first I open source thought) since what I wanted didn't exists (a git managed blog, with nothing more than git).

Wordpress is flexible, but you'll need to stay up-to-date on security updates, make sure your blog doesn't fall over if it's popular on HN, do something about spam, etc. If that's not your cup of tea, consider something hosted (tumblr, posterous, wordpress.com) or something simple (static site generators work fine, see p4bl0's comment.)

This may or may not matter: tumblr is free, conventional hosting (Dreamhost, cheap Linode) will run you ~10-30/month, and pay-as-you-use hosting like nearlyfreespeech.net can be extremely cheap (especially with static site generators). I'm using the latter option, for what it's worth.

If all you want to do is write a blog then definitely go the tumblr route (for that matter posterous does pretty well too). I have been a long time user of wordpress (hosted sites on my own as well as wordpress.com) and recently started using tumblr and posterous and like the simplicity of these blogging tools/services.

I personally wouldn't use tumblr for a less personal, more professional blog. Tumblr feels like blogging meets something like twitter or facebook, which is nice for personal blogs, but a lot of what tumblr offers (the dashboard, non-text posts, reblogging, liking and following) seems kind of wasted on a more professional blog. If you're mostly just posting text and looking for a place to host, I'd probably go with something like wordpress (self-hosted or wordpress.com).

Just my two cents. Tumblr arguably does have the benefit of allowing people to find your posts more easily through hash tags, I guess.

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