Blogger is removing the functionality to host your own “Blogger” content by disabling the FTP/SFTP functionality from their system. I’m considering their hosting solution or migrating to a WordPress solution.

If I stick with Google’s Blogger hosting then bandwidth should not ever be an issue as they have a distributed computing system. The only downfall is that I’ll probably have to use a sub-domain to host any static files. If I move to hosting my own WordPress then I’ll probably have to increase my virtual host resources since PHP and MySQL will be required therefore using more system resources. This also increases my hosts vulnerability footprint. Not only am I essentially increasing adding two services but WordPress has had its fair share of security issues.

If you want to stick with Blogger the simple alternative is just to migrate to a hosted Blogspot and use custom domains. You can simply point your DNS host domain.com or sub.domain.com to Google’s DNS servers and within a short amount of time you will be up and running again. With this said there are a number of variables that come into play.

Google’s Blogspot does not support subfolders, one alternative is to use a URL redirection to point to the new host which means you will need to search around for the code to insert into the header of your template to accomplish this. Per the migration tool there is no sub-folder support.

domain.com/blog/ —> blog.domain.com

Since Google would hosting your blog there really isn’t a wonderful way to handle this as there is not a provision to use Mod_Rewrite or something similar though with the number of complaints Google has received on their blog they may implement a feature.

If you are considering hosting with another solution such as Wordpress then you have more options available to you depending on your hosting solution. Wordpress has an integrated import function to import other Blogging but you must first convert you existing hosted Blogger account to a Blogspot solution. Blogger does have an export function but it seems broken per these posts. Wordpress also has custom URL functionality so it would be easier to match the format that blogger was using especially if you can utilize Mod_Rewrite.

Personally, I’m still undecided…