Come on in and pull up a chair. The Blog Ladies have a rant to share with you today. The list of issues with free blogging platforms continues to grow.  We’ve heard of a couple interesting events from one of the social communities we frequent.

We’ve talked about the importance of choosing a domain name using one of the keywords you want to get ranked for by the search engines.  Sounds logical and easy, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, getting the keyword targeted domain name you want is not easy any more. Good, short domain names in most niches are in very short supply. You could even spend a couple of days trying to come up with one that isn’t taken.

You’ll be rethinking your keyword strategy several times before you find one that’s available. Don’t delay when you find the one– buy it and run with it!

I have even heard a few people say they think that someone… somewhere goes through and buys up on spec all the domain names that they’ve searched for but haven’t bought. This may be paranoia or frustration talking, but then again– maybe not. There still is a fair amount of spec domain name buying going on.

So, what does this have to do with using a free blogging platform? Imagine you started your blog on one of these services some time ago. You’ve built up your readers and have your blog ranked with the search engines so that you’re getting organic traffic daily. You’re doing pretty well for yourself.

Then one day, you discover that someone has put up a free standing blog using the same domain name you used on your free service. Ouch!

We’ve talked about how little control you have over your blog on the free services. Your template choices can be very limited. But, you want to use any small advantage to make your blog stand out from the thousands on the internet.

You also are at mercy of the host’s TOS. Policies change all the time…what is acceptable this week might be frowned upon tomorrow.

Imagine, logging in to post to your blog and receiving an error 404 message: Page not found. After you recover from the initial shock, your first thought would be…your blog has been either hacked or deleted. Okay, you might give it a day—hoping against hope that it was a mistake or a glitch, but to no avail. Your blog is still missing in action.

So, you put up another blog, tranfer your back-up files, and think you are back in business. Frustrated from all the extra work…but up and running again nonetheless. Of course, you’ve lost all your links because your original name remains unavailable.

It’s time to post again, you attempt to log in and again see error 404. After you stop banging your head on the desk, you ask around. Someone suggests it might be the template that you were so happy to find because it made you different.

You change the template and Voila…your blog is back… All I can say is ouch!

My sympathies to both the bloggers who are suffering here. The above scenarios just don’t happen when you have a self hosted blog. The closest anyone can come to stealing your domain name is to use it with dashes–provided you bought the major permutations of your name when you purchased. In the second scenario, it’s true, you could be hacked. Your template could break. But, you wouldn’t ever be in the limbo of thinking your blog had been deleted by the powers that be, and wondering what you might have done to tick them off–not once, but twice. And, you can easily go out and find any number of templates to replace the broken one.