Is blogging still fun?

I am not sure how often I feel like walking a road, ending up somewhere at a hurdle. And then I look around me and think “How did I end up here?”.
I mean this “blogging thing” is great. It gives the power to distribute information “to the masses”. Being an anti-authoritarian at heart, I cannot but get a kick out of how easy it is nowadays for any Joe Blow to publish information. No surprise I, like many others, took “the blogging thing” at heart and started to walk a road. But this weekend, I looked around me, and thought “how did I end up here” ?
Are you like me? When I use a tool, I develop a dependency on it. Like millions of other bloggers, I do my part to create meaningful content, to do a serious effort of making my blogs look good. But I also developed a dependency on my providers: the servers or services I use for my blogs. There is no worse start of the day than to wake up, check my blogs and find out one of them is down. Nothing as frustrating as having a spark of inspiration, starting a blogpost and having the thing crash in the midst of it. Curses fly when -once again- I upgrade one of my blogs or add a new widget only to find it all goes pear-shape because of a technical problem.
I guess it all comes down to a feeling of “with my blog I provide a service”. I create information or give entertainment. I feel sad when those reading my blogs are faced with a blank page. The longer it takes for the blog to come back up, the more frustrated I get.
I feel that the past months have been a particular hard time for bloggers. I don’t know where it all started.
Probably it started during the systematic and repetitive massive hacking of shared host providers, of which GoDaddy, one of my main hosting providers was hit the hardest. Tens of thousands of blogs were infected and started to spread viruses. Then I had a hard and long fight against the sub-standard uptime of my shared hosting servers.
In June, WordPress.com went down. The same happened – for a shorter period, this weekend. In the past weeks, Tumblr, the host of several of my blogs went down randomly. And last week, Posterous was hit by hackers, bringing down their servers through a massive DoS (Denial of Service) attack. The folks at Posterous released a new IP address for site with a custom domain, like my Shot from the Hip TwitPic equivalent. But the hackers followed, and hours after the remedy, the patient was sick again. Then Posterous decided to move to a new data center over the weekend, but as I write this, services are still not restored as they should be. There are still delays in posting updates via email. Cross-posting to Twitter lags behind too. It was kinda funny to see my yesterday’s “Good Morning”-post only coming up at 8 pm… People must have thought I was drunk.
No, the fun is not out blogging, that is for sure. True, I learn while fighting technical problems: during the adventures of cleaning my hacked GoDaddy sites, I learned a lot about security issues. Fighting inadequate hosting brought me to better analyse what I want from a hosting supplier. But still, I think it is good to stand still once in a while and evaluate how much time I spend creating content – what I truly like in blogging – and how many hours I spend on solving technical issues. And to make sure I don’t let it get too far.
What is your experience?

Quantity : Add to Cart