My Review Of Squarespace
So, I listen to podcasts. And lately, Leo Laporte has been taking advertising from a blog hosting service called Squarespace. Having had the experience of self-hosted versus third-party hosting, I was interested to see what Squarespace had to offer. Since they offered a free 14-day trial, what did I have to lose?
Thus, I Can Has Test.
Here’s a brief overview of the good and the bad.
- Good: Ajax-y feel makes adding content a snap.
- Bad: Not as intuitive as it appears.
- Bad: Overpriced, in my opinion.
- Bad: Control. You don’t have it.
So, the good is that working with the layout and content is really very pretty. Where others program like WordPress have a back-end, Squarespace allows you to edit from the page as it appears. This is very neat. Changes are shown to you (but not to others) in real time.
However, it’s not as simple as it appears. Sometimes, the menus are not as self-explanatory as you’d think or something that should be simple takes more steps than it should. For example, I added a text widget. It took about three to four steps, plus some headscratching, to get it in there.
I think the price is a little high at $8 a month to start. It’s certainly not exorbitant, but you can do better. GoDaddy offers self-hosting plans for as low as $5 a month and WordPress.com and Blogger offer this kind of service for free.
Lastly, and most importantly (in my opinion), is control. I’ve had blogs at BlogSpot. And they’re a fine service. But ultimately, if your host goes under, you stand a chance of not having anything as backup. Also, you are ultimately at the discretion of Squarespace in terms of what kind of site you can have. Take this line from their TOS:
The final choice of whether an account is in violation of any of these policies is at the sole discretion of Squarespace, Inc.
Sure, they’ll tell you every company has these statements, but with a self-hosted provider, you can create any site you like. It’s not your providers business. That, to me, is why I would never go back to a third-party host for my website needs. I want full control and access to complete backups of everything.
You should want that too.
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Hey Patrick,
Thanks for the kind words! Some quick clarifications:
“I think the price is a little high at $8 a month to start.”
Comparing our $8/mo to a shared server is not comparing apples to apples. Squarespace hosting is grid based and scales with your traffic fluidly. All sites are hosted on a set of servers — instead of just one — so you get the benefit of load balancers, caching, etc. You’d actually need to compare the setup with something Rackspace would provide costing $5k+ monthly for the same hardware setup (or against another hosted provider).
“But ultimately, if your host goes under, you stand a chance of not having anything as backup.”
Aside from being stable and profitable for the past half a decade — you can export all of your Squarespace content to XML format to save it offline, and your blogs to MT format for importing anywhere you’d like. Your site is actually further backed up beyond this which is likely more maintainable than trying to worry about backups yourself.
“Also, you are ultimately at the discretion of Squarespace in terms of what kind of site you can have. ”
We of course word this in our favor, but in practice — we’re generally just prohibiting explicitly pornographic and hate-inducing sites. This actually is the exact same as blogger, or a self hosted solution in that your self hosted solution is residing at a datacenter somewhere, and that datacenter likely has its own policies regarding content, traffic types, and legal disputes. Blogger as well will shut down sites depending on legal threats received and the circumstances. We’ll always be completely upfront with you from the beginning if you’re worried about a TOS issue arising from pornography or other content — and all situations are handled with extreme care.
Though, in running Squarespace for half a decade, maybe 1 in 100,000 sites warrants a TOS discussion, and I don’t think we’ve ever had a major issue.
Hope this helps!
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Wow. You guys are fast. I figured nobody would even see this review. Kudos. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
While I understand scaling and shared hosting (but not really the grid stuff) and I understand the theoretical differences, I personally haven’t experience any bandwidth or service problems using shared hosting to run multiple sites. Now I have low traffic sites, so maybe that’s where that comes from. But I was speaking from my experience as a regular blogger guy. Large scale sites might be more comfortable with your prices, and for the record, your pricing was more a minor point for me.
As for backups, exporting each time is a pain and people will stop after about a week. Do you offer automated solutions for backing up? For example, I use a plugin that sends my SQL database to me nightly via email. I archive it and I always have one if something does go wrong. Also, can people get to the FTP files for their site? Also, do you own all the themes or if they leave, will they have to redesign the whole thing? (On a side note, backing up to MT is hardly a service.
Sorry. I loves my WordPress.)
As for the TOS, it’s cool. However, I have seen the occasional BlogSpot blog get pulled for something incredibly gray and not come back. And WordPress.com is just ridiculous to the levels they will go to make sure a blogger makes NO money on his or her site…at all.
All in all, thanks for the response. It’s encouraging to see companies who follow up and you folks are certainly on top of that. I still recommend self-hosting for the serious blogger, but really, people can absolutely sign up for your 14-day trial and see how they like it.
February 18th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
I heard Leo Laporte espousing the merits of SquareSpace so I gave it a try. Alas, the lack of FTP was a dealbreaker (something Leo doesn’t mention in the ads).
Patrick D. Reply:
February 19th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
It’s certainly not for everyone. I like more control over my site. Being able to make full backups of everything is critical. But some people will probably do fine at Squarespace, I guess.