Blogger to Remove FTP Support, Pushes Custom Domains as an Alternative
Blogger is arguably the most popular blog hosting platform today. It offers a simple way of publishing to the web for anybody with a computer and an internet connection. Obviously, the same holds true for any blog platform and this is basically what people use these platforms for. But there are those who want to have more control over their blogs while still using the Blogger platform to publish their thoughts. Using a remote FTP server is one way to make this possible. It is common practice for a lot of bloggers to use FTP servers to host their files for their Blogger pages. These are the same users who will probably have to look for other alternatives as soon as possible as Google is looking into removing support for those feature in the near future.
In a post published by Rick Klau of Blogger, he writes that FTP has been a significant setback in Blogger’s ability to further improve and develop. Only 0.5 percent of active blogs actually get published via this route but a significant portion of our engineering resources are allocated towards FTP support. Aside from that, Google will soon make the critical infrastructure for FTP support unavailable. This will require Blogger to completely rewrite the code that is responsible for FTP processing.
The 0.5 percent of bloggers may not sound like a lot but given Bloggers millions of users, this adds up to a significant number. These bloggers will probably not appreciate this kind of news but Google is really trying to make the change as painless as possible. According to reports, the search engine giant is willing to provide tools to help the affected users with transition to either a Blogger or Custom domain on a managed hosting server that is designed to work with the blogging platform.
