What do Miles Davis, Jamie Kennedy and Dane Cook have in common? That’s right: Squarespace. Confused? Let me explain…

Though first founded in 2003, Squarespace has been attracting a lot of attention more recently. Simply put, Squarespace is an entire hosted blogging platform that, like WordPress or any other CMS, allows you to easily set up and manage a site without messing with any HTML code.

It’s the perfect service for beginners but they’re not the only ones using it. As well as the celebs mentioned above, many organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund and at least one of Twit.tv’s blogs, also use the platform.

WordPress.com, Automattic’s hosted WordPress solution, offers a VIP service have also attracted several big name customers, including the BBC, CNN and Gigaom among others.

But why?! These customers could obviously afford to host their sites themselves or with anyone they choose, so why do they opt to go with a hosted blog/CMS platform? Given how trivial it is to install WordPress or similar on a blank server, it seems odd to accept the perceived limitations of such a service.

However, underneath the surface lies a set of compelling features that may just change the way you, as well as others, choose to host their site in the future.

Why Choose A Hosted Platform

Many bloggers don’t stop and think about it, but by running WordPress, Joomla or any other CMS on their server, they are, essentially, hosting their own blog platform.

While this has a lot of benefits, including greater control, the ability to add your own plugins and the freedom to easily move your site to another host, it also comes with many added duties and responsibilities, including the need to apply security and other upgrades, maintain the software and generally stay on top of the technical aspects.

For some, this can be a huge hassle. For those without a lot of technical expertise or time, they may be forced to either have someone else do it, often at great expense, or risk making critical and costly mistakes.

Hosted services cater to a new kind of Web professional. Those whose primary business is largely offline, but who still need a professional, secure and easy-to-maintain Web site with direct control over its content.

A professional website is expected of every business and celebrity these days. That’s a lot. It is easy to see why these services are compelling to those who need features beyond most free blogging services but want the ease of use and security that comes with a hosted solution.

For those who fit the description, however, cost is most likely one of the driving factors in the move as a hosted platform, if done well, can provide significant cost savings.

Why Hosted Blogs Are Cheaper

On the surface, Squarespace’s pricing plans don’t seem to offer much value. The prices for having one’s own domain are about on par with other grid or cloud hosting solutions, such as MediaTemple. Worse still, the bandwidth and storage allotments, though not bad, won’t exactly wow anyone, especially considering they do not offer email service.

Squarespace is a cloud hosting solution so it’s able to scale with traffic spikes. It also eliminates a lot of the technical work associated with creating a blog, including setting up the platform, design and maintenance. This removes the need for a technical adviser, designer or other 3rd parties while still obtaining a professional-looking site.

By taking over many of those more technical elements at almost no additional cost over the regular hosting, it can save both time and money. For the less technically oriented, these solutions are much faster, easier and cheaper than bringing other people on board to help build a site from scratch. What’s more, the end results will usually be comparable to those who do.

But just wait a second before you head off to spend some cash with SquareSpace…. this cost and ease comes at a pretty heavy price. As users of other platforms will testify, a hosted solution can be very constricting.

The Limitations of a Hosted Solution

If you host your own platform, quite literally the sky is the limit to what you can do with. You can use any theme you want, install plugins to alter functionality and even, depending on the license, change the code to improve its features.

With a hosted platform, you are limited to the features that the service provides, as limited or vast as they may be. If your service doesn’t have a feature you want, you can’t use it even if there are plugins for other platforms available to make it happen.

To make matters worse, if you do decide to move to another service, it may be difficult to make the move. While you can likely export your data without incident, you can not access the raw database file or other tools to make the move easier.

Though you are not “stuck” with such a solution, it definitely is not as easy to pack up and move as it is with your own platform on your own server.

Bottom Line

The question you need to ask yourself is: is this solution right for me?

If you have a lot of technical expertise and don’t mind spending the time to maintain your site properly, you’ll likely find traditional hosting both cheaper and more flexible. If you are relatively new and don’t wish to learn or invest too much resource into your site but still want a professional home page, a hosted solution is likely the better answer.

Though some hardcore WordPress users are experimenting with Squarespace, it seems likely that the service, and others like it, will have little to offer those with both the time and experience to run their own installations.

However, at the end of the day, that’s a surprisingly small number of people. With everyone from doctors to auto mechanics getting on the Web and needing a professional presence, many of them will be faced with a tough decision, to go it alone and learn, to get help and possibly pay or use a hosted service.

For hundreds of thousands of individuals and companies, the decision is much less clear and should be weighed carefully based upon needs, both current and future, costs and the features provided. It is easy to see how Squarespace and similar services come out of that weighing up looking like the best option.

Tags:   Squarespace • WordPress.com