Innota is a completely rethought blogging platform. It's a combination of speed, reliability, ease of use and affordability. And it's just plain awesome. Here's why we made it and what we think is wrong with existing solutions.
Why Innota?
I've always liked blogs. I've had many of my own and I've followed hundreds of them, and I still do.
My favourite blogging platform of all time was Posterous. It was simple and easy to use and had some nice and beautiful free themes. I had at least three Posterous blogs, one personal, one for my son and one for my one-photo-a-day photo project.
I was sad to see Posterous go. I literally lost hundreds of posts and my parents were no longer able to follow the daily life of my son.
That was a turning point for me. Since then I've never trusted another free service for anything as personal as my own homepages. Whenever I sign up for a new service or app (and I try a lot of them!) I always check the business model the company has. I no longer trust heavily funded startups with no clear business model.
Static Site Generators For the Tech Savvy
I've made my first website in 1996 and building and hosting my own homepages was not a problem. After Posterous I decided to do it all by myself and I fell in love with Jekyll and later Sculpin which both are static site generators. They both offer you full control with easy and cheap hosting without the worries of upgrading Wordpress whenever a new security breach is found.
The problem with static web sites is the difficulty of posting. You need a real computer with access to command line and git. Clearly, these are not tools for the average blogger. Posting from a smart phone or a tablet is a nightmare at best.
Wordpress to the Rescue?
What about hosting your own Wordpress blog? You own the content and the server. A large portion of the Internet runs on Wordpress and, obviously, they've done something right, right? Wordpress is easy and cheap to host and it's easy to make your own themes.
Having your own server and hosting your own Wordpress comes with a responsibility. You need to make sure that your server is secure and that you regularly update Wordpress. Believe me, It's not for the faint of heart.
You shouldn't have to concentrate on anything else except the content in your blog or running your business or whatever you use your site for. Spending 30 minutes to backup and upgrade Wordpress is 30 minutes away from blogging or meeting new clients. How do you want to spend your time?
Scaling any website to be able to serve thousands of requests per minute is not an easy task. Scaling Wordpress is difficult. It's not only time consuming but it's also not cheap.
Hitting the Sweet Spot with Innota
This is where Innota comes into the picture. Innota hits the sweet spot between fast, reliable hosting of static websites and the ease of use of dedicated blogging platforms. Except that you don't have to host anything yourself or ever upgrade your servers again. It really is the best of both worlds.
What if someone buys Innota and closes it down like happened with Posterous and again I lose all of my blog posts? That won't happen.
Since Innota is a statically generated site it's just a matter of a few clicks to export your full site. And by full we mean not only the content of your site but also the full theme including all the scripts and stylesheets. Hosting the exported site somewhere else is really simple.
If you don't like Innota or just want to try another host you can export your site anytime you want. It's actually really handy to export it and save the full site to a USB disk. You can even show your site from a USB disk to your grandma who doesn't have an Internet connection. Don't even try that with Wordpress.
