Blogger VS Self-hosted Wordpress

WordPress and Blogger, both are the top blogging platforms having several advantages and disadvantages. Blogger is a free blogging platform by Google and WordPress is also a free platform but here we will compare blogger with Self hosted wordpress as several bloggers at many webmasters forums said that Blogger/blogspot can not beat self hosted wordpress. Now, Let me tell you that, I am using both platforms since November 2007 and this review is on my personal experience and i hope this will bring the trustworthy and fair information. Below are advantages and disadvantages chart of wordpress and blogger.

Advantages of Self Hosted WordPress

  • You can have your self hosted wordpress paying few dollars per month from any shared hosting company
  • Your Blog, Your Rules. You can write whatever you want.
  • You can manage your blog database.
  • You can easily import-export your wordpress blog.
  • Large number of wordpress themes
  • WordPress Plugins to enhance user experience and add additional functions in your blog.
  • Categories and Tags system makes wordpress more useful
  • You can ask programmers/developers to develop a plugin for a particular function.
  • Galleries feature to upload single or bulk images and put a organized gallery in a post.
  • Each uploaded image can be edited or removed from wordpress dashboard.
  • Users can get full size picture by clicking on thumbnail and we can monetize or control that page too where full size pictures are displayed.
  • We can add authors, subscribers, contributors and administrators
  • Read More Summary
  • Its SEO friendly
  • We can add unlimited static pages.
  • We can change permalinks structure.
  • Feed of every category and tag.
  • We can make a post private or can protect by using password function.
  • Akismet spam protection
  • Comments system is user friendly and we can use page numbering by using some plugins too.

    Disadvantages of Self Hosted WordPress

    • Shared Hosting Accounts are not reputable for wordpress blogs as when you use few plugins and having a thousand visitor per day, Your account will be suspended.
    • If you are having more traffic, you need to buy VPS which may cost more than your expectations and its not easy to manage VPS or Dedicated server. You need to hire system administrator or concerned expert to do such things.
    • Bandwidth Problems
    • Holes: This is lack of security
    • Always have to use Cache plugins which everyone dont know how to manage.
    • Some times its not easy to import a wordpress blog due to import file size limit .
    • WordPress’s dashboard interface is not much user friendly.
    • Not everyone knows, what kind of plugins a blog must have.
    • Widget management is also not much easy – little complex.

      Advantages of Blogger/blogspot

      • Its Free!
      • Its by Google! which has reliable servers and offer reliable services than shared hosting accounts.
      • Its easy to create blogs with blogger and you can create as many* blogs as you want within 1 blogger account (* limit is 100 blogs per account).
      • Unlimited Bandwidth
      • You can easily publish posts as it has user friendly dashboard (at least easier than wordpress)
      • We can find thousands of free blogger templates
      • We can easily upload new themes
      • We can easily add gadgets
      • We can easily monetize a Blogger blog by easily integrating Google adsense in our blog.
      • We can upload free images up to 1 GB (we can also increase space to another 1GB by tricks)
      • Its also SEO friendly and Google Loves Blogger blogs.
      • You can even start an Adult blog with blogger
      • Built-in dashboard stats
      • Spam protection and enhanced comments system
      • We can easily add custom domain
      • We can import-export blogger blog easily.
      • We can add static pages (upto 10)
      • We can make a blog private by restricting access to invited Google account holders only.
      • We can add upto 100 blog authors which can write for our blog
      • We can add or restrict admin privileges of an author.

        Disdvantages of Blogger/blogspot

        • We can not add additional functions .
        • We only can upload images/pictures and can not other files like .zip, .exe etc
        • Some times, Blogger’s spam detector marks your blog as SPAM forgetfully and several say blogs are even deleted without any notification and you loss your data and contents too if you dont have any backup of your blog.
        • We can not manage uploaded images within our blogger account. We have to visit our picasa web albums account for managing our uploaded images and its not easier to find uploaded images in Picasa Web Albums.
        • Poor Help desk.
        • Blogger’s Comment system is not much user friendly
        • We only can import other blogger blogs and can not import wordpress etc blogs.
        • Blogger labels can not be indexed in search engines as default robots file (which blogger generates for every blogspot blog) restricts search engines to index labels. This may cause your blog SEO however, Google uses blog archives to Index your blog but what about other search engines ?
        • Sometimes, Your blogger blog posts are not indexed due to some bugs and Google indexes those posts after several days or even months. This happened with me several times.
        • Professional bloggers see blogspot blogs with weird eyes

        These are advantages and disadvantages of Blogger and Self hosted wordpress blog.  Normally, Professional bloggers go with self hosted wordpress and some also trust blogger too as i did not had any issue with blogger blog having more than 10k visitors a day since last 20+ months. Let me know your thoughts !