Excited about blogging and wanted to create a blog for your own ? Heard lots of friends making money with their blog and want to create you own blog too ? Well, I am happy on your decision to join the internet blogging community but there are several things you must know before rushing in to it.
We will not be looking at what blogging software to use, there are basically a dozen good and popular ones out there, select one that you feel is easy to learn and pickup, and perhaps ask around what your friends are using is a good option too.
We will be concentrating on comparing free and paid website hosting options for blogs. We know that any website including a blog needs a web hosting, and it is important for you to make the first step right otherwise you might suffer losing all your hard work later when you are thinking of taking the blog to next level.
Basically, you should understand what free blog hosting and paid web hosting is. Of course, anything that is free is always tempting, but you should know that there are no free lunch under the sun, people give out something in order to gain something out of it, it is no difference in any free blog hosting offers you can find out there. In other words, you have to be crystal clear of what you are giving out when you take that free offer and whether it is worth giving that out.
Different free Blog hosting offer may have different tactics to tie you down to them but generally these free blog hosting are trying to make use of your content to generate advertising income, that means they will reserve a piece of real estate on every of your blog web pages for their own.
You cannot use your own domain name for your blog in most free blog hosting provider, and this can be a major problem for you if you are building your own website branding, you are going to lose your website identity when you want to transfer your blog elsewhere, or the free blog hosting decided to exit the business.
Some popular free blog hosting are basically just a marketing tool for their open source program, they don't put advertisement in your blog and they don't allow you to put your own either, that means you are going to loose out plenty of cash if your blog gets popular someday, you have sacrificed the option to turn the traffic into cash.
Most of the free blog hosting uses a centralized blog program for easier management, that means you will not have the control over the blog program, for example adding plugins or extra modules of your choice to make your blog stand out from others, you will not have the control over the look and feel of your own blog either, although there are generally many choices of themes and templates available for you to choose, you don't have the option to use your own custom made theme.
If you are serious about creating a blog and looking forward to make some money out of it, I would recommend to spend the little extra money to register a domain name and get yourself a reliable web hosting provider, in a paid web hosting environment, your content is your own property and you are basically renting a web space from the web hosting provider, you can terminate the account at anytime you wish and take all your content with you to another web hosting provider. The web hosting provider is not going to place any advertisement in your blog and you decide what you want to put in your own web page (just be sure that you do not violate the Terms of the web hosting account usage). You can hire a web designer to design your blog or grep a free theme from the internet to install in your blog, you have full control over what extra plugins to install in your blog.
You may be thinking...oh, well I am only testing out so free host shouldn't matter. I would advise you not to take the risk, as you experiment further, you tend to put up more work in to the free blog and you will not be able to take these hard work with you if you are seeing some success with your testing and wanted to move to a paid web hosting provider. You are basically starting fresh again in a paid web hosting and that is going to take you another round of testing and waiting.
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