Anyone run a Blog?

[ronaldlees]

I've been running blogs since about 2010. The first four or five years, there was no traffic. Then a few years ago the traffic started picking up slowly until today I have enough hits to theoretically monetize it and break even on the hosting costs. Over the years, I'd noticed that almost none of the hits traversed the article tree, which I have linked from each article to the next, or from each page of the article to the next page of the same article. Yeah - some of my stuff is boring I know. But this was close to 100 percent being first-hit-only.

So, I did some checking and discovered that nearly all the traffic is coming from blog spam urls. When I culled that stuff out, the remaining hits didn't justify the extra costs for monetized hosting, so I decided not to do it. So, does anybody else run a blog, and have you noticed an increase over the past few years in blog spam urls? Make sure you check your real hit count before you commit to any extra hosting options.

 

[obsigna]

I saw more traffic 5 years ago. Nowadays, most traffic is coming from crawlers of the search engines. Recently, I switched from WordPress with a comment facility to another system without. With the WP system, I had some troubles with comment spam-bots, connecting from Russian and Ukrainian IP's, trying to place viagra, sun glasses and Nike comments twice a day. This has stopped now, of course.

At the beginning of this year, I moved the WP-BLog from a web-hoster to my home server, and I kept it there yet with the other system. It was not exactly because of costs. Actually, I continue with the same hoster, because of the domain names. I did this, because I like to have everything under my control.

I abandoned already long time ago the idea of making money with my publications. I even stopped embedding AdSense stuff from Google.

So what's the point of a BLog then. It is my diary and it is useful for me. I frequently look-up scripts and procedures written-up there. Others may have a look, however, this is not that important to me.

 

[ronaldlees]

So what's the point of a BLog then. It is my diary and it is useful for me. I frequently look-up scripts and procedures written-up there. Others may have a look, however, this is not that important to me.

The blogs pretty much do that for me too - they have a diary function, and that's about it. Seeing the rising numbers of hits over the past couple years, I had visions of a free hosting upgrade in my head - but I guess it's not to happen. Oh well.

 

[Phishfry]

I appreciate the effort both of you put into your writings.
Looking at page hits is tough. Because FreeBSD comes without configurations for many programs, the user is left to perusing the web trying to find that vital settings they need. Thankfully many FreeBSD users write blogs.
So the nature of the reads may be years after you wrote the comments. That does not make them any less valuable.

I had visions of a free hosting upgrade in my head

What is the thresh-hold for this? Certain amount of real traffic? What does it cost you now?

 

[Datapanic]

I don't do blogs, but I do have a couple wiki's running MediaWiki 1.30 on FreeBSD 11.2 with lots of extensions and even Parsoid for the MediaWiki Visual Editor! I also admin other wiki's running the same version on CentOS 7. The big difference? FreeBSD easily supports the latest packages and doesn't require any jumping over hoops and barrels to install MediaWiki like CentOS or RedHat does. Now, if Atlassian products like Jira, Bamboo and BitBucket could easily run on FreeBSD, I'd be really thrilled. Until then....