Netcraft: Changes at MT, Blogger Highlight Blog Hosting Strategies
In the article linked above, internet research and analysis firm ***Netcraft|http://www.netcraft.com/*** offers their take on the Blogger and Movable Type news of the past few weeks. They offer an explanation for Six Apart’s licensing scheme as follows:
qqq|Six Apart’s pricing for MT 3.0 appears to have been influenced by two hosting-related concerns: steering MT users to the more profitable TypePad, and licensing MT for use by other hosting providers. The $69.95 price on the cheapest MT license costs more than a full year of TypePad hosting, which offers far more features.|qqq
In other words, they’re hoping that people who are using MT for more personal reasons will just use the cheaper TypePad instead, and that people who are running MT in commercial installations will start paying for it, since they are now allowed to charge for it.
Netcraft also correctly identifies the blogging community as “price-sensitive”. Like me, many users simply can’t or won’t pay for a blogging service, particularly if they are already paying for their web hosting space.
Which brings up an interesting point. I’m already paying $25.95 per month for my web hosting service. ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/*** could conceivably purchase some sort of Movable Type site license from Six Apart, and then enable all of their users to have access to it for a small monthly fee increase. If this were to happen, I certainly might consider paying the few extra bucks per month.
Apart from the Movable Type changes, of course, Netcraft discussed ***Blogger|http://www.blogger.com/***’s recent overhaul. For no particular reason, we have been managing our ***Scrabble This!|http://scrabble.prwdot.org/*** blog with Blogger. I have had a chance to check out the new Blogger site and features, and I have to say that I’m very impressed. Thanks to the power and financial wherewithal of ***Google|http://www.google.com/***, Blogger is able to offer a lot of advanced features for free. They have great XHTML compliant code, well-designed CSS and XHTML templates, built-in commenting and RSS feeds, and blogging-via-email to name a few features.
Blogger has really come a long way. I used Blogger to manage ***my old blog|http://peter.prwdot.org/?p=archives-individual*** from December 5, 2000 until April 15, 2002, and moved to Movable Type after that because it had more features and allowed me to have complete control over the blogging system from my own web host. I still like the control offered by running my own blogging system, but I have to admit that Blogger is now really a great service. I highly recommend it if you’re looking to start up your own blog.
Of course, I’d also be happy to host your blog on this server if you’re interested. I’m already hosting ***Pulcher Sentio|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/*** and ***waltondammerung|http://waltondammerunprwdot.org/g/***, so just drop me a line if you’d like to be set up as well!