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Blogger.com is Giving FTP and Domains Das Boot

Submitted by Jamie on Saturday, 6 February 20104 Comments

If you publish your blog on a personal domain (away from blogspot.com), and you use the ever-popular Blogger.com to do so, that will all change come next month. March 26th, to be exact.

Before I continue, I feel the need to point out that I somewhat know what I’m talking about when it comes to Blogger.com. I was the 49,107th person to sign up for Blogger, and I have used the service on and off for nearly ten years.

Moving on, I see a few things wrong with this. For one, if I were still dependent on Blogger to publish my site, and my hosts are set up to use Blogger.com specifically, I would be in a pickle right now. For you see, my hosting expires on February 2end. To keep my site, I would naturally, pay for a year’s worth of hosting. Blogger sent out the notice to FTP users, that they were discontinuing the service on March 26th, on February 3erd. Unless they transfer their domain and hosting over to Google’s webhosting. Well, I’ve already paid for my hosting, as have 99.9% of the .5% of the “affected” FTP Blogger users, for the year, and I can’t get that money back. No refunds. $120 gone. I don’t know how much Google webhosting is, but I’m assuming they’re expecting their users to jump over to blogspot.com for free. Huh? I’ve just renewed my hosting for a year, with no refunds, and I’m either going to have to be forced to go to a free, non-professional site, or uproot everything and go to a new CMS. Which isn’t a bad idea to install something on your server so you have 100% control.

Then comes this part of Google’s excuse: “FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger.”

Ok. Well. When I was using Blogger back in 2000/2001, there was no bells or whistles for Blogger. Not even a title box. You had to do every little piece of HTML by hand. And I did, starting with the title tag at the top of my post, then typing everything out. I still do that in my WordPress entries. I’m not that lazy. Posts were numbered references on a page published once per month or week and updated periodically throughout that month or week. Blogger also featured a list of updated blogs on the front page. A Blog of the Month. A blog directory. The front page of Blogger was updated by people with souls, not Google drones.

Blogger was great.

Then in early 2003, Google acquired Blogger, and it became the abomination that it is today. Limited everything. One thing that really made me turn away from Blogger was the fact that in 2003, Google disliked something I published with their software to my personal, privately owned domain, hosted on a server other than their own, so they took the liberty to log into my account, delete the post from my domain and then delete my blog from my account. I never got it backed up. I had to just link to my old archive page. After that violation, which was not even against my hosts TOS and they should have had the final word on whether my content was removed or not, I went into self-hosted publishing platforms.

The moral of the story? Get your blog and go with Wordpress. Or something that you’re comfortable with. Blogger is on it’s way out. You can thank Google for that.

4 Comments »

  • Margaret (Nanny Goats) said:

    What the…? I have been agonizing over converting to Word Press for a long time now and just haven’t done it. This might be the catalyst I’ve been looking for. I thought that with Google taking over, that Blogger would actually be better or compete with Word Press, but after reading your post, it sounds like it’s just going to keep being aggravating. Are they really going to take away my ability to redirect to my own domain? Or did I read that wrong?

    Also, I cannot believe they actually removed content from your own blog. Did you badmouth their leader or something? Golly!

    - 10 February 2010 at 1:52 pm
  • Jamie (author) said:

    From what I understand if you have an independent domain and hosting, you will no longer be able to publish via FTP on Blogger. Your blog with them will become defunct. I’d put all your archives in a neat little directory, link them, and then install wordpress and just add the link manually. If you have a domain purchased through Blogger.com, they will automatically redirect everything to a blogspot.com URL that you pick out for the domain. The hosting company that I use were the most blogger.com friendly hosts on the internet. They can’t say that anymore!

    As for the content, it was about another blogger stealing from me and lying about me. She whined and complained so much as so many people, Blogger techs decided I wasn’t worth it. When I switched to Greymatter, she whined to Noah Grey!

    [WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.

    - 11 February 2010 at 5:35 pm
  • Polly said:

    I find what you say very interesting but what I fail to understand is there are so many people that offer blogs for free out there why do you need your blog to be hosted? What do you really gain from this? The reason I ask is that if you dislike Blogspot then Wordpress can be reeled out quite professionally and made into a formal website.

    If you do need a host what about Zymic, I believe they offer web hosting for free?

    Just a thought.

    - 21 February 2010 at 11:19 am
  • Jamie (author) said:

    I like having my own host for my site for a few reasons.

    The first is I can block people who are annoying and harassing or stealing my content. The second is my site is so much more than a blog. I have a forum on here, a picture gallery, and the archives of my blog from back in 2000-2007 when I first started using WordPress. I also use the site as a secure email address, one that never gets passed around the spam bots. With that comes a bit of security knowing that if I do get on a spammers list, I can just delete that email address, and not fear of someone else registering it. Last, but not least, having a .net, .com or .org makes whatever you’re pushing seem more professional, and people tend to take you more seriously. I say that as someone who watched and participated in the .com rise and fall.

    I loved the old blogger, from back at the turn of the century. Blogger has changed forever and not for better. And it’s really a shame.

    [WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.

    - 22 February 2010 at 2:05 am
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