[davnicwil]

I own a self-hosted blog and am actually in the process of deciding whether to transfer over to medium. To be honest I'm pretty much decided that I will, because it's just easier, not to mention I can save myself some hosting fees.

The key questions of the debate on the cons side of switching, assuming you're blogging for fun and not thinking particularly about advertising or massively customised SEO strategies, seem to be:

1. do I own my content 2. will my content be accessible forever

As this post highlights, the answer to (1) on medium is YES. So, no problems.

The answer to (2) is also, for all practical purposes, YES, but you shouldn't depend on it.

But is this really such an issue anyway? I certainly assume that the vast majority back up their photographs, just by nature, and how difficult is it to back up the plaintext of your blog pieces too? If you have backups, and the answer to (1) is yes, then really, it starts to look like an easy decision.

[j45]

What would you have in place in case Medium went away or lost the data compared to what you already have?

[davnicwil]

If Medium does go away, I suppose I'd take the backups and just go through and repost everything on another platform, or simply set up my self-hosted blog again.

Yes, that would be immensely annoying, but it's not really that terrible of a downside in a calculated risk offset against how much easier (and, again, free-er!) medium is to use, and to maintain.

[j45]

I think Medium is nice too and will be doing some writing there.

I think I'm looking at things over the span of 2 decades of keeping one's presence and information online whether self-hosted or with a service, both of which come and go.

[HappyTypist]

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