Articles: Free vs Paid Blogs

Free Software With Free Hosting

This is the way to have your own blog without spending a dime of your hard-earned money. However, there are several concessions you will need to make.

CONCESSIONS:

Subdomain - A domain name is a unique name on the Internet that usually ends with .com, .net or .org. The domain name of this site is blogbasics.com. If your name is Bill Smith, it might be nice to have your own blog at the address www.billsmith.com. Unfortunately with free software and free hosting, this will not be possible. You will need have a name that is part of another domain, perhaps www.billsmith.blogspot.com. This is known as a subdomain. So your first concession is that your site will be part of the free hosting service's domain. In the case of our example this is Blogger (or Blogspot - they are the same company).

Features - Free services often have fewer features than paid services. If this were not the case there would be no need for anyone to pay! Features you will likely have to do without if you use free software with free hosting are: the ability to post pictures online and the ability to create your own look for your site.

Advertising - Companies would not give away free software and free hosting if there was not value in it for them. So they can derive benefit from your blog, they will run advertising on your site, most often placing a banner immediately above your site. Naturally this detracts from the look of the site. Also, you have no say over the content of the ads, though you can generally assume they will be relevant to the content of your blog.

ADVANTAGES:

The primary advantage to this option is that there is no cost involved. This is a great way to start blogging because you can try it out to find if it is something you will truly enjoy. If you find it is not a hobby you enjoy, you have not wasted any money. If you become an avid blogger, you can move to a better option in the future. Of course there is a downside to moving your site in the future that may cause you to read many of your readers.

WE SAY:

We recommend this option for people who simply do not wish to pay anything. If you have the ability to pay a few dollars per month, we recommend using a paid solution as it provides more and better options.

YOUR OPTIONS:

There are several companies that offer free software and free hosting. Among them are:

Blogger
Livelogcity
Livejournal
Squarespace

Of these services, we currently recommend Blogger as the best entirely free solution.

Go to the Next Page.