Blogger has announced that they will be discontinuing support for FTP publishing of their users’ blogs. They say that a mere 0.5% of Blogger users opt to have the static HTML files hosted on their own servers, as opposed to the Blog*Spot servers. The costs outweigh the return, and developer team wants to drop the legacy feature so they can move on to a more modern infrastructure, unhampered by a feature used primarily by the earliest Blogger sites.
Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year’s post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you’re interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.
FTP support goes dead on March 26th, 2010. If you’re part of that 0.5%, don’t panic! A migration tool will be released in late February, and a blog dedicated to helping people transition is now online.
