Being a blogger isn’t as easy as it seems. There are about a thousand different considerations that go into blogging and not a single day goes by that I don’t wish I couldn’t spend more time blogging and podcasting. There are quite a few topics that I would love to be talking about - copyright, the election, the Bush legacy, and stuff that’s ten times more interesting but I don’t want to mention until I’m ready to talk about it.

But it’s not a perfect world. Last week, View from a Farley featured zero blog posts (except for this one), zero podcasts, and zero updates of any kind. This is largely because I spent a good part of my week dealing with technical problems. The site has been down four times in the past week (just twice yesterday), switched hosting three times, and has been the subject of many e-mails. At the time of this post, the site is being hosted by Hostgator. Everything indicates that Hostgator will be a much better host than any of the others. They guarantee 99.9% uptime and everything is loading much faster, so no more waiting for a minute for the page to load or seeing all sorts of errors when you try to come to the site.

But even the transfer wasn’t easy. Wordpress (the popular blogging engine View from a Farley uses) is extremely easy to use under normal circumstances, but not when trying to seamlessly transfer from site to site. The basic site files are easy enough to transfer, but making sure that all of the old posts get to the new site is hard.

So this is what I think: Someone should create an easy-to-use, reliable hosting service with a dedicated support team just for bloggers to help with problems unique to bloggers. It should be cheap enough for people starting out, reliable enough so that contact with support is minimal, and dedicated support with a real number you can call, unlike DreamHost. Bloggers should concentrate on what they do best: blogging. Technical stuff should be minimal and handled by people who like looking at stuff bloggers could care less about.