Where To Host Your Blog
When you’re first ready to get a blog up and running you need to decide on where you want to host it: you own host/domain or one of the many free hosting sites available to you.
Probably the two most popular or at least most well-known free blog hosts are wordpress.com and blogger.com, both of which have their pros and cons. While I much prefer to host my blogs on my own domain I have used both of these free providers. The obvious pro here is that they are free, you don’t need to pay anything to set them up and maintain your blog. The downside though is that you can be limited in what you can do with them. Hosting a blog on wordpress.com for example means no income earning ads (adsense) etc can be placed on your blog.
Then there are the free web hosts where you can often install a wordpress or other format blog with the click of a button: phpnet.us is one example; other free sites allow you to upload a blog to them (you can go to wordpress.org and download the blog first) freehostia.com is one such hosting company. The disadvantage here is that while it’s easy to set your blog up, you may find they have their own terms or advertising which limits you a little, and of course there are times with free hosts where you can lose all control of what’s happening with your site.
My personal preference after much trial and error is to host a wordpress blog on my own domain (as I’ve done here) while it does cost you some money (and the price varies from host to host) you face none of the limitations you do with a free host and you have total control on any advertising, formats and templates etc. Two hosts that I recommend are Lunarpages and Hostgator: both give you the option of unlimited blogs and domains etc, along with either one click wordpress installation via the control panel or you can upload your blog via ftp etc.
The key to choosing where you want to host your blog is remembering that you may have it for a very long time so you’ll want a host that not only gives you the room you want but gives you what you need; no advertising, the chance to place your own ads and other links etc.
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October 7th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
[...] - free or paid hosting both offer similar ways to set up your first blog (you can read more here: Where To Host Your Blog) a key thing to remember though is that no matter where you host you need to have access to MySQL [...]
December 13th, 2007 at 10:58 am
I host on mosso - so i’m a bit different - but that is because I run a few database intensive sites that crash all other shared servers….
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January 1st, 2008 at 9:53 pm
[...] Where to host your blog - covers free and paid hosting [...]