My Blog
WordPress & LuxSci Love
I do not pretend to be experienced in social media. I will be the first to openly acknowledge that I’m a n00b. But hey, everyone needs to start someplace, right? Although I may be new to social media, I am quite experienced in many forms to technology. This is the same technology the forms the foundation for any social media. So when I finally decided to start a blog, I literally had dozens of possible platform choices.
Now before I explain my choice, a little background information to help illustrate my thought process.
I work in a highly regulated industry, one in which we have numerous levels of control over how data is used. I have always maintained a keen eye on information security, and is something I pride myself upon. A thing that so many people fail to understand is once a piece of information is stored on a system, in essence, it will always exist and persist never to be completely erased. Any large service provider, whether it be your employer, your free web mail provider, Facebook, or your paid web hosting provider, should be maintaining a system of information assurance and business continuity. In a nutshell, this means they need to protect your information and protect their ability to conduct business without interruption of service. Some common means of achieving these goals might involve an extensive data backup system and high-availability, redundant datacenters. But I digress…
So what is the point of all this? Ask yourself this question: Who owns those systems and associated infrastructure?
- You
- Someone else
Here’s a hint: It isn’t you.
By now, every one of us is familiar with the End User License Agreement (EULA), Terms of Service (TOS), or Privacy Policy. But did you also know that service providers can and do change those documents to suit their needs? Facebook recently amended their TOS with wording that seemed to imply that all user content was now owned by Facebook. To my plesent surprise, this caused a substantial uproar in the blogsphere that resulted in Facebook restoring their original TOS and pledging to involve their users in the future decision making processes.
So what does all this have to do with my choice of blog platform? Well ultimately it comes down to which options provides the greatest legal protection and control over my information. Free services are inticing because the appear to be free; but weren’t we all taught that there is no such thing as a free lunch? A free service earns money from either the direct or indirect sale and brokering of your personal information. Paid services with a singular purpose are not necessarily better, so I decided to host my own blog with my service provider of nearly five years, LuxSci.
LuxSci is serious about security and customer service, and I like that. It is why I chose them for my email needs nearly five years ago, and why I again chose them for my web hosting needs. As a company that leverages open source software and standards, my choice to use WordPress as my blog platform was a no-brainer.
