Free vs. Paid Blogging Services

Are you a new blogger? When you start blogging, the first decision for you to make is whether you want to use one of the free blog hosting platforms, set up a separate blog site domain or make your blog part of your online business domain. You will always face advantage and disadvantage associated with free and paid blogging services. Let`s start with pros and cons associated with free hosting for blogging

The internet has several free blog hosting platforms to choose from. These sites provide the software and an easy‐to‐use interface to help you set up, host and run your blog site.

Here are some Advantages of Free Blogging:

1. The important advantage is that these services are free.

2. It takes only a few minutes to have your blog up and running. All you need is a name and an email address to register and launch your blog.

3. No maintenance required.

4. Great for New Bloggers.

5. If Blogging did not work for you, you can quit any time.

6. Last advantage is that the more popular blogging platforms are constantly adding new features and improving on old ones. As a registered member you get immediate access to these updates free of charge.

Here are some disadvantages with using these free blogging hosting platforms.

1. The most significant disadvantage may be that your site is actually a subdomain of another website. Blogger.com and Wordpress.com are two of the most popular blogging platforms. If you wanted to set up a blog site talking about diet2health2beauty, the name of your site on Wordpress would be something like www. diet2health2beauty.wordpress.com or on blogger, it would be something like www. diet2health2beauty.blogspot.com.

2. In addition to the fact that the name of the site is a little hard to remember, any links to your blog contribute to the page rank of the blog, but not to your online business. On the other hand, search engines do take any links from your blog to your online business into account in determining the page rank of your web pages.

3. The blogging platforms don’t give you access to the code that makes up the builder and your template. Without access to the code your ability to customize the themes and templates is somewhat limited.

4. There are restrictions on the ads you can place in your blog. This is true on wordpress.com especially. They won’t allow you to do any blatant advertising. If they find any ads on your site they will pull them off immediately. That means you can’t even use Google Adsense on your blog.

Another option available to you is to go out and sign up with a company that provides hosting services for all kinds of websites. You would then find blogging software and download it. Three of the more popular third party paid blogging hosting platforms are:

.Wordpress.org (not Wordpress.com.)

. Bluehost.com

. GoDaddy.com

After downloading the software you would need to FTP (send by File Transfer Protocol) blog files to your host and create a database.

Here are some advantages of Paid Blogging Services:

1. The first advantage to this approach is that it gives you your own domain name. Your diet2health2beauty blog site could be called www. diet2health2beauty blog.com, for instance.

2. The primary benefit may be that you have complete freedom to customize your site and to put ads wherever you want, assuming you know how to write the necessary HTML code.

3. As with the free hosting platforms, links from your blog to your online business count as outside links in search engines’ page rank determination.

Here are some disadvantage of Paid Blogging Services:

1. The installation and setup may be difficult and time‐consuming if you don’t have any experience in this area.

2. It can be frustrating trying to working with a hosting company, download files the blogging software files, FTP‐ing those files to your host and setting up a database.

3. You may need to know some programming, e.g., CSS, HTML, and database design.

You could make your blog part of your web business. If your eCommerce site is www. diet2health2beauty.com, your blog URL could be www. diet2health2beauty.com/blog. This would mean that any link going to your blog is also building link popularity and page rank for your web business. On the other hand, any links from your blog to your eCommerce site would not be considered outside links.