Blogger's FTP service seems to go down frequently. As often as it goes down, I don't know why they can't do something to shore it up.

Here's a rather long thread of disgruntled users, just from the recent downage that started yesterday...

http://groups.google.com/..../browse_frm/thread/9c93b0bfd9e66ad0

It's not until you get to the 91st response that you see someone from Blogger actually chiming in to that they're working on it.

This is what lead me to move several of my blogs over to Blogger's Custom Domains, at least that way I can still use Blogger and not have to deal with FTP problems. But Custom Domains is not without its challenges.

For one, it won't hold the template images. I have to store those files on another server, and have the template (or CSS) link to them. Second, all Blogger-hosted blogs have their content images hosted on Picasa, and Picasa limits me to 1024Mb of file storage. Normally that would be plenty for one blog, but I have lots of blogs, and I need more space. I guess I'll have to pay for the extra storage.

Another disadvantage to Custom Domains is that I can't add non-blog pages to the blog. I like to supplement a blog with several hard-coded HTML pages (non-blog pages), that are linked up from the blog template. I just feel that this adds some unique SEO value. It simply cannot be done, unless those pages are hosted on a subdomain, or an entirely different domain. But then again, that submarines the unique SEO value.

And the biggest problem with moving a blog over to Custom Domains is that it doesn't move the content images from the old server to the new. You either have to move them manually, and change all the image links, or create a map that tells Blogger where the old images are. Either way, it's a pain.

But then again, you don't have fuss with FTP problems.