Why I decided to move my weblog away from DotNetJunkies
It's about a year and a half ago now that I started my blog. Back then, I chose for hosting it at DotNetJunkies for a number of reasons:
- I wanted my blog to be part of a larger community of development oriented blogs
- I wanted a full blown weblog engine, but not host my own Windows web server
- I liked the .Text engine
Lately, I became more and more uneasy with the services of DotNetJunkies. I have always really appreciated the free service and I understand that the bills must be paid, but I feel that the advertisements that they insert in my weblog pages are too intrusive and (this is the most important point) they slow down the pages considerably.
Since the .Text engine was replaced by CommunityServer, the deal for me as a content provider has become worse. In the migration, most of the comments on my pages where lost. The usability of the admin pages has decreased, the engine rips my HTML apart and removes a lot of extra mark-up that I wanted to add. What bothered me most was that there is no good way left to show source code (especially source code containing many angle brackets as do HTML and XML). The final push came from this article by Jacob Nielsen. Especially point number ten about owning your own domain name. I decided that I really want to own the domain name of my blog. Most visitors come in via Google anyway, so being part of the DotNetJunkies community is not that valuable after all.
Soooo, I registered the TeunToString.net domain and am now using Blogger to post my messages there and I must say: Blogger has come a long way. It is very mature and now provides most of the functionalities of a PHP or ASP.NET based engine, but using only static HTML on your page (which rocks performance-wise). I will keep all of the content in the DotNetJunkies blog online so people who made bookmarks can still use them. I will also keep posting small reminders to the blog when I post a new article on the new one.
Lots of thanks to DotNetJunkies for the provided free service. I really appreciated it and I am sure that you did the .NET development community a big favor. I'm moving on now and have to pay for my hosting.