Posterous is shutting down and all Posterous blogs will be deleted on April 30, 2013. Posterous was acquired by Twitter earlier and now it seems Posterous is no longer needed. They had promised then to give “ample notice if we make any changes to the service”, and now the time has come. Its means problems for thousands of Posterous bloggers who created their online journal on name.Posterous.com. Its time to move your blog again to a new url and loose all your Pagerank and search engine traffic.
My family maintains small personal blogs on Posterous after a introduced it to them a few years back as one of the easiest blogging tools, especially since it was an excellent way to blog by email. Simply email to a special email and Posterous will add it to your blog. It was possibly the simplest way to blog from anywhere.
Posterous announced that current users can visit posterous.com/#backup and download all their photos, video, documents from Posterous. Every blogging service seems eager to grab these users and now there are easy ways to export Posterous blogs to WordPress.com, export to Squarespace and even to tumblr.com. But what is the guarantee that these free blog services will not get acquired and go away some day.
Perils of Free Blogging Platforms
As always, if you are in blogging for the long term – developing your blog on a free blogging platform is never a good idea. Your own domain name, own paid web hosting and free WordPress software seems to be the best bet to keep a blog running in the long run.
Free blogging platforms come and go more often than expected. Remember how JournalSpace blogs went away one fine day … just like that … with no backup! Its too risky to develop your online presence to just see the need to switch to a new site someday and lose all search engine traffic and advertising revenue. It is surprising so many sites close everyday! Will your Tumblr.com last forever? Your domain name might…
We also started this blog on Blogger.com and switched to self hosted WordPress Hosting in 2006, and then switch to VPS hosting in 2010. It was the best move for us to give long term blogging security and at least you are not scared that your blog might be deleted some day due to complaints, get accidentally deleted (like the official Google blog!) or get acquired for millions of dollars and simply go away…. it costs money to maintain a blog, but is worth it.
If you want to move your Posterous blog, make the correct decision where you want to host your blog.