Disadvantages of hosted blog platforms

Certainly a hosted blog platform like Wordpress.com can be extremely easy and quick to launch, but the solution is not suitable for many business blogs. The hosted blog solutions cater more towards personal blogs. The disadvantages of hosted blog solutions particularly affect businesses.

Some of the disadvantages of hosted blog solutions are:

• Default design restrictions - Many hosted blogs pose more challenges for custom design work than truly open-source blogging software. This can be for a couple of reasons: either restricted access to source code or the inability to create and add custom code as a theme or template. Many hosted solutions rely on prebuilt design templates, which may be used by hundreds or thousands of other blogs.
• Lacks configuration potential - The ability to customize the functionality and capabilities of the blogging platform may be restricted on hosted blog solutions. This may become an issue for business blogs later on in their lifecycle. As businesses begin to rely more on the blog with time, the needs for the blog may expand. The inability to customize the configuration or program new applications or modules within the blog website may become an issue for many businesses. The short-term ease of web maintenance may become a frustration further down the road particularly for business blogs.
• Lack of overall control - For many businesses, the lack of complete control that comes with hosted blog solutions can pose a frustration overtime. Although bloggers on hosted solutions do own the content, they are at the mercy of their provider for uptime, maintenance and functionality requests. Also by selecting the default root domain of the hosted solution, you many also be completely dependent on the provider permanently.
• Challenge moving the blog - Hosted solutions cannot be downloaded and moved to another provider, because the underlying source code is protected by the provider. For bloggers that use open-source (self-hosted) software, moving to another server can be relatively easy. Simply download the source code, files and database and move to a suitable server.t