A lot of the people I help wonder if hosting their blog on a shared server is okay. Yes it is. But rather than all this “cloud” mentality, I much more prefer the idea of taking as much control as possible.

There’s a latest friend asking if her food blog should come out of a fully-featured box provided by a company I’ve never heard of. The WordPress backend and widgets and boxes are really quite a whiz and someone spent hundreds of man-hours assembling those features.

For her to hire me to do the exact same thing would be a multi-thousand dollard deal to be sure – not exactly worth it for a hobbiest food blog, I’ll admit. But then you have to consider the very few stories like this one where 73,000 blogs were all cut out because of the actions of a few.

After seven months of being a BurstNet customer, an unknown department of security shut down the service which served WordPress hosting (and presumably some nifty features). The story raises more questions than it answers. I have only two unsubstantiated guesses as to why the shut-down took place: Illegal pictures of kids, or spy networks (which are all the rage right now) after the Russian spies were handed off.

The preaching part is to host your own blog as much as possible in your own hands as hard as that may be. You may be one of 73 THOUSAND legit blogs sharing hosting somewhere else for simplicity, but a handful of crimimal acts on that same service could result in your blog vanishing. Preachy part, part two: Make backups of your databases! That’s where your posts and titles and tags and comments reside.