Patrick Says

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.