Free Hosted Blog or Self Hosted Blog
If you are reading this article you are most likely at a pivotal stage where you are trying to compare and contrast whether to continue with a Free Hosted Blog or start up your own Self Hosted Blog. Many first time bloggers start with a Free Blog site before understanding the benefits of that come from hosting your own blog.
Many people start using the most well known free blogging platforms such as Google’s free tool for creating blogs – Blogger and the ever popular WordPress.com.
What Benefits Come From Free Hosted Blogs
- Free Blogs are great in that there are no costs to start up or any ongoing operational costs. All platforms usually have a easy to use user interface and it takes very little time from sign-up to publishing your first post.
- You do not need to focus on advertising your blog or getting it indexed by search engines as many free platforms have all of this built into the backend.
- Free – no ongoing costs for hosting or upgrades.
What Drawbacks Come From Free Hosted Blogs
- You usually have limited control and functionality.
- You may be restricted with site layout options, themes and fonts.
- Search engines will see your site as being shared and this many impact on your search engine rankings and in-turn impact on traffic to your site.
- There will most likely be advertising that you may not want displayed on your site as well as links to other sites or content.
What Benefits Come From Self Hosted Blogs
- You have full control and functionality of your site with the ability to change almost every detail of your site.
- You have an almost unlimited array of themes and plugins that you can implement on your site.
- You will reap the revenue from any advertising that you display on your site as you will be in full control on what form of advertising you display.
What Drawbacks Come From Self Hosted Blogs
- Cost of purchasing a domain name – this is usually around $10 or less for a one year period for a good Top Level Domain name.
- Cost of hosting the domain – this depends on what features you want to have access to and whether you want any extra features that may bring a benefit in starting your own blog.
If you already have a website, creating and maintaining a blog will definitely bring many benefits and this should be even easier as you already have the foundations of the website.
