pros and cons of hosting a free blog
I’ve been asked by many friends if they should host the blog themselves with their own domains or sign up for a free service like blogger.com. Places like Blogger which allows you to host your blog for free is a good option for many people. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of hosting your blog at a place like Blogger:
The Pros
1) It’s easy to set up and maintain a blog. You don’t have to go through the trouble of installing software and configuring it to work on your server. All you have to do is sign up for an account and start posting.
2) It’s friendly for beginning bloggers. Sites that host blogs offer good tutorials on how to make your blog postings, so that even someone who is completely new to the concept of blogging can do it easily.
3) There is no need to pay for things like a domain name and hosting.
4) Monetizing your blog is easy. Rather than having to manually put HTML/Javascript codes on your blog to manually set up things like AdSense and Pay Per Click advertising, you can select an option on most blog hosting sites that does much of the work for you.
The Cons
1) You don’t have as many options to customize your blog. Remotely hosted blogs are admittedly somewhat limited in terms of what you can actually do on them. You have to stick with what is provided to you in terms of look and features.
2) The URL you get is always yourname.BLOGSPOT.com. You don’t get to have a custom domain name like YOURNAME.com. This can
possibly hurt traffic to your blog.
3) Blogs hosted on free blog sites may not look as professional as self hosted blogs.
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This is an excellent analysis of the pros and cons of using blogger. Personally, I decided to go with my own site, even though there was a small initial outlay of money required.
September 10th, 2007 at 9:19 pm