At hosted for free blog services like blogger.com and WordPress.com, you can create a blog in a mere matter of minutes. Starting and setting up one is as easy as pie. All you have to do is follow the free host’s recipe and your blog will quickly be online.
This kind of blog is not necessarily the best kind to have. Instead, you might be better off paying for hosting, getting your own domain name, and installing WordPress as your blogging platform. There are some disadvantages with free hosting that you should be aware of, if you intend to put a lot of time and effort into blogging.
* There will be less configuration choices than a self-hosted blog. You simply won’t be able to tweak it as much as you could with self-hosting. At the start, this may not make much of a difference. However, as your blogging demands and capabilities grow, you will probably find the lack of configuration choices a detriment. The configuration limits of free services can hold you back.
* You will have to choose your theme from a selection of canned themes. Some of the theme choices may have some design change options built into them, and the particular free hosted service you choose may allow some theme modification. Overall though, you will be using themes that everybody else using the free hosted service chooses from. Your blog will probably wind up looking like a lot of others. With self-hosting, you can have your own unique theme.
* Although you will have the ownership of the content you create for your blog, you don’t have complete ownership of your blog with free hosting. The online service you use for your blog has ownership of the domain name associated with your blog. You can’t change or improve the blogging platform, you just make do with what is offered. You will have to live with the way your blog works on a hosted free service. With a self-hosted blog, you own the whole shebang and can do whatever you want, because you own your own blog. That’s a very good thing.
* The default domain name you will have is not a Top Level Domain. An example of a Top Level Domain name is myblogname.com. The domain name will by default, include the name of the online hosting service. An example would be myblogname.thenameofthefreehost.com. A self-hosted blog with a Top Level Domain name, is simply more professional and impressive. It’s best to register your own Top Level Domain name and use it for your blog.
* If you ever decide to make the switch, it can be a challenge to move your freely hosted blog over to a self-hosted blog. You will have to export your blog’s content, and then import it to your self-hosted blog. This process may or may not go smoothly. Personally, I’ve had good luck exporting and importing content to a self-hosted blog, but things can go wrong and my palms were sweaty each time I did this. The worst-case scenario is that valuable content can be lost or not imported to the new self-hosted blog. Your blog’s content is all the effort and hard work you put into making your posts. You don’t want that to forever disappear with a mouse click. Keep in mind that moving content to a self-hosted blog can be risky.
In my opinion, owning your own blog by using WordPress as your blogging platform, having it self-hosted at a web host you choose, and having your own registered domain name, is the most professional and serious way to have a blog.
