On the choice of blog platform

And the vegetable head teacher mentioned recently had to give up WordPress, when said, "When I can not solve the immediate technical problems ..." If you want to solve it, the only way is to learn to become a skilled it engineer ... However, I do not have this step, for WordPress and become an engineer, this is not my outlook on life. On the technical issues of blogging, I prefer to give up and spend my time somewhere else. ”

As a user who has used many blog systems (Z-blog and WordPress, etc.), I can also feel the embarrassment of using WordPress. Today, I'm going to talk about WordPress's problems in China for my experience.

For beginners who have just contacted the blog, the first question to consider is how to choose a blog platform, which has two options: BSP and independent blog.

Choose a BSP (blog service provider) to provide free or charge of the blog space, these BSP mostly for companies or non-profit organizations, their free or paid for the blog services are mostly with some ads, used to maintain the blog services including space, services, maintenance expenses. Domestic well-known BSP has Sina blog, Baidu Space, Sohu blog, NetEase blog, Blogbus, Donews and so on, foreign have Google Blogger, Windows Live spaces.

The advantage of the choice of BSP is to save a lot of costs, including domain name purchase costs, virtual host, etc., and do not worry about server maintenance issues, as long as the focus on writing articles can be, for the beginner blog is indeed a good choice.

But the problem with BSP is that you are using the BSP domain name and space, everything you have in the BSP control and mastery, BSP can be arbitrary to reduce service quality, BSP can also be at the top of your blog to add flashing Ads (Microsoft's Windows Live spaces is so dry), There's no way you can do that. Your final choice may be to leave this BSP, but the cost of switching blogs is huge, because the RSS feed address changes, you may lose some loyal readers, you and other sites exchange links will be ineffective, your blog in the search engine rankings lower, Using BSP lacks a smooth strategy for switching blogs.

The choice of independent blog can solve the above problems, but you have to pay some cost, the domain name cost about 10 dollars per year (assuming registered in GoDaddy), the cost of virtual host is about 100 dollars per year (assuming the purchase in DreamHost), Such a host is sufficient to support a medium traffic (about thousands of IP) blog. If the traffic is very large (more than 10,000 IP per day), then basically no virtual host business is willing to such customers, so usually need to be hosted in the IDC (Internet Data Center) or rented servers, the price of assembling a Xeon server is about 6000 to 10000 yuan, the rental server is higher prices, But you don't have to buy the server yourself. In the bandwidth, there are 100M sharing, 5M Exclusive, 100M exclusive and other different bandwidth, 100M sharing refers to the 10-20 users sharing the use of 100M bandwidth, usually the room will limit the flow of each machine will not exceed 5m,5m alone can enjoy the 5M bandwidth alone. Usually 100M shared 1U server can cope with 100,000 IP per day traffic, the hosting price is about 6000 to 8000 yuan per year, 5M exclusive price of 2000 yuan per month/year 20,000 yuan, 100M exclusive prices will usually reach more than 200,000 yuan per year. Therefore, in the early days of the blog, usually choose to buy a virtual host more cost-effective. Develop to a certain scale can consider 100M share hosting.

But the new question comes again, what kind of blog program do you want to choose? Which virtual host do you want to select?

Blog programs and virtual host does not seem to have a relationship, in fact, the relationship is still very large, domestic virtual host speed is usually faster than abroad, but most of the use of Windows Server and IIS built, this platform for ASP + access/ SQL Server's blog system (for example, Z-blog,. Text, etc.) is very suitable, but for foreign popular WordPress is not suitable for, there may be a variety of problems, compatibility can not be protected.

Foreign virtual host almost exclusively is the lamp architecture (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP), which is most suitable for the use of WordPress, but the foreign virtual host due to the slow speed, and for various reasons may often inaccessible, Therefore, its wide application in China is limited.

This is related to the Linux platform and Windows platform problems, most people in China are familiar with the Windows + IIS platform, Linux and Apache is not familiar with Windows, if you are hosting a leased server, the installation of Linux environment requires a lot of knowledge, To learn and master Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and know how to configure security policies under Linux, this is usually already the level of a network engineer, and then the PHP and MySQL proficient, this becomes a development engineer, for IT professionals outside the amateur, It's almost impossible to do anything about it.

There are, of course, workarounds to use Windows without Linux and to install Apache, MySQL, and PHP in a Windows environment, although Windows lacks some Linux features (such as SendMail), which is relatively relative to Windows Server easy to learn to use, easy to set up, you can save time to learn Linux.

Install the above environment, you can install WordPress, WordPress for development Engineers is a perfect system, its flexibility and scalability is very large, but it is because of the flexibility of WordPress too much, Make the original WordPress function is very few (even the most simple counters, pagination, anti-spam message is not, early even without tag), need to install a lot of plug-ins, adjust the template content to complete its operation, and WordPress plug-ins and templates are thousands of, use and installation are different, So for ordinary blog users, unless it is a professional IT engineers, the use of WordPress has a certain degree of difficulty. Relatively speaking, some of the domestic blog system (such as Z-blog) although the use of a small amount of compatibility is not very good, but the usability is much better than WordPress, easy to learn and easy-to-use, integrated most of the main functions, installed almost without modification can be used normally.

Therefore, independent blog is not so easy to complete, before choosing a stand-alone blog, you need to think about whether there is time and ability to learn the above fresh knowledge.

To sum up, the flexibility of renting and hosting the server is the largest, can support the largest flow, the cost is the largest, but also to learn the operating system, Web server, programming language, database and so on a series of knowledge, an IT professional as well as network engineers and development engineers to shoulder such ability, It usually takes a few people to work it out; renting other people's virtual host space can be an easier way to do without increasing the time to learn the operating system and Web server (Linux + Apache or Windows + IIS), but programming languages and databases (PHP + MySQL or ASP + A ccess) or must understand; If you use a BSP-hosted blog that doesn't need to be learned, write directly.