This is the second post in a series called Blogger Anxiety. Please read the previous post on Blogging and Comments.

These next forms of blogger anxieties deal with blog hosting and blog themes. The topics that will be covered are hosting problems, theme manipulation, and stats packages.

Hosting Problems

I personally have a love-hate relationship with my host. I love my host when my site is working and the load-time is fast. And I absolutely hate my host when my site is down.

It’s getting easier and easier to change hosts, but who wants to change hosts every few months? Is it too much to ask for a good and reliable host? On my personal site, I just switched to Media Temple because I thought they would be more reliable than my previous host. However, my site has been experiencing a number of outages that readers have actually pointed out to me. I ultimately decided to stick with Media Temple, but the anxiety this hosting company has brought me has been tremendous. I hate having a site that is down, even for five minutes out of the day.

Other hosting problems are when switching name servers and even upgrading your blog installation. A WordPress plugin that seems useful that I have yet to try out is called Maintenance Mode. It shows your readers a maintenance page while you are upgrading or tweaking your blog. One technique I have personally used is to manually set up a maintenance page and modify the htaccess file.

Theme Manipulation

It never fails: You perform a minor update of your blog over the weekend and then check your site at work and find that your blog’s appearance is all out of whack. What happened?

More than likely, the theme manipulation you performed didn’t account for large items (such as long links and/or pictures) or you didn’t test it on the browser called Internet Explorer.

Making one small tweak and having something go seriously wrong is enough to have your hair turn white (or fall out). I recommend having a local backup of your blog so you can make theme tweaks without having these tweaks go public first. For WordPress (and Windows) users, I found a good article on installing WordPress locally. I also recommend versioning your theme before making any significant changes.

Stats Frenzy

There just seems to be too many stats packages out there right now. Most bloggers are familiar with AWStats. Other stats packages include Mint and Google Analytics. There are many more.

A lot of bloggers (myself included) are concerned that people are actually going to the site. While comments on blog posts are good, when the comments stop rolling in, all a blogger can hope for is that people are reading the content.

Stats can be a curse, however. You know you have it bad when you check your stats every hour or so to see who the most recent referrer is. It’s like watching water boil.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading the type of blogger anxieties associated with hosting and themes. Feel free to add onto my list.

Blogger Anxiety was originally part of a two-part post on my personal site. Several commenters helped inspire some of my points. I’d like to say thanks to them. Thank you Bes Zain, Vivien from Inspiration Bit, Josh Motlong, and Shawn Blanc. You all helped me with this series.

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