How to setup a FTP blog on blogger

Many of you might have heard of the blogger's ftp publishing feature. There is another feature called custom domain with blog hosted on google servers (we will discuss about this in some later post).
Blogger FTP Publishing with your domain: This lets you to publish blogger posts on your own domain(like yourdomainname.com) instead of the default blogspost domain(yourblog.blogspot.com). This requires you to have a domain name and good web hosting. The blogger post pages,home page and other pages will be published as html files on your hosting account.So this requires you to buy a domain name and a hosting account.


Custom domain with hosting on google servers:This also lets you to publish posts onto your own domain name.But unlike the FTP publishing method,this doesn't require a web hosting account. You just need to buy a domain name and point the cname records to google.Google will host the files on their servers and you can just manage your blog just like any other .blogspot blogs

Before we get into the details of setting up an FTP blogger blog lets first check out its advantages.

1)Easy Site Back Up: If you use FTP publishing all of your blogger pages will be stored as html files on your server.So it will be easy to backup these files frequently.

2)Published posts will never be lost. Google bans some blogs for some reasons.If the blog is an FTP published one it can never be lost.. It can be restored from backups..

3)Everything is on your server.So you can use .htaccess rewrite rules and many other stuff.. I will soon try setting up an FTP blogger blog and let you know more about it..

The main disadvantage of the FTP blogs are
1)It can use only the blogger classic layout
2)It cant have the easy to install "Blogger widgets or gadgets"

Steps to setup a FTP Blogger Blog
1)Buy a domain from some good domain provider.I do suggest name.com and godaddy.com
2)Buy a good web hosting account.I personally suggest Host Gator as it is highly reliable

If you sign up on HostGator use the coupon code GREEN to get a 25% discount.
3)Now change the nameservers of your domain name to that of your hosting account.It would be something like ns134.hostagator.com or so
4)Now switch your blogger blog to a Classic Template.You can do that by going to the Layout Tab
5)Now to change to Ftp publishing goto the Settings Tab and choose Publishing
6)Click on FTP (publishing on your ISP server) or SFTP (secure publishing on your ISP)

7)Now fill in your FTP details
8)Fill the FTP path as /public_html/ if you wish to install the blog on the main domain. If you want to install it to yourdomain.com/blog then give the path as /public_html/blog/
9)Now when you hit save Settings, you are almost done.Now you just need to opt forRepublish Now to get your blog published via FTP.