Why I Will Never Go Back to a Hosted Blog

Last updated on 16 February 2025

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Imagine living in a hotel where everything’s done for you—meals, cleaning, the works. Sounds great, right? But then you realise you can’t rearrange the furniture, paint the walls, or even hang up your favourite cute prints. This is exactly what it’s like having a hosted blog.

It might be a poor analogy, but I kinda like it. And look, I used to have a hosted blog. In fact, I had one for about 5 years! My very first blog (actually the first few blogs) was on Blogger, and for the most part, it was fine! I learnt how to write for the internet, how to code things in the background (though, minimally), and how to connect with other bloggers online. Some of my good friends today are ones I met back then!

But then in about 2015 I changed to a self-hosted WordPress blog and I will never look back.

And I want to tell you why. So we’re going to look at three main reasons that I won’t be going back to a hosted blog.

3 reasons I wouldn’t go back to a hosted blog

Ownership
Limited freedoms
Monetisation

1. Ownership

I mentioned hotels right at the beginning. That’s what staying in a hosted blog is like. You might be super cosy and comfy, and everything might be sorted for you like room service, cleaning, water bills etc, but you’re paying a subscription every month to be there … and you don’t even own your hotel room.

The hotel, or to move away from the metaphor a little bit, your host, can kick you out or shut down the hotel/business at the drop of a hat. Much like we don’t own our social media, it’s hard to hold ownership fully when you have your blog hosted somewhere that you have minimal control over.

With a self-hosted blog, if your hosting company (mine is Lyrical Host and I highly recommend them) decides that it’s closing down, you can take your entire blog with you. When you find a new blog host, you upload your blog content to their servers, and it’ll be the same as it was in the front end.

Yes, having a self-hosted blog can be a bit more expensive than if you used something like Blogger, Wix, or Squarespace, but the payoff is greater as you have more freedom. Which we’ll chat about next.

2. Limited freedoms

When I first started blogging, I used Blogger. They gave me a domain and handled the hosting. It was so easy, and actually really good for me starting out in 2009. But after a few years, I wanted to take it to the next level and I got more serious about my blogging. I wanted to add specific plugins and wanted to be able to do certain things, but Blogger basically said, “Nope, not allowed.”

The lack of control was frustrating, even with the little bit of coding know-how I had picked up over the years.

When I moved to a self-hosted WordPress (dot org!) blog, my freedoms were nearly endless. Now, if you’re brand new to the online space in terms of long-form content, then maybe too much freedom isn’t a good thing. But for me this was brilliant. I was no longer constrained by only themes that Blogger had (for example) or how my blog looked. I could add plugins to my blog to help my readers navigate around, read the content, engage with it, and more.

If your hosted blog site says no, that’s pretty much it.

3. Monetisation

A big drawback to a hosted blog is the limitations around monetization. They often have strict policies on how you can make money from your site, and sometimes, they even take a cut of your earnings.

While I only started playing around with ads in 2024, it was such a simple process, and I knew that it was going to be an easy set-up because I was using a platform (WordPress) that had everything in place for me to do so. I could install plugins to help track ads and embed checkouts easily for products I was selling.

It’s a lot easier to monetise your blog if you’ve self-hosted it. And there are actually lots of ways you can monetise your blog – and having that self-hosted blog is going to be better for all of them.

While hosted blogs are a good start if you’re just new to blogging and you don’t want to have all those freedoms just yet, as you get settled int … having a self-hosted blog is going to be better in the long run, and these reasons (and probably others if I really thought about it 😆) are the reasons I won’t go back.

Thinking about making the switch to a self-hosted blog? Drop your questions in the comments below. And for more tips and in-depth personal guidance, check out The Blogging Room.