Hosted vs. Self-Hosted

Today I’ll be talking about the pros and cons of hosted blogs and self-hosted blogs and a little bit about both. So you can decide which one you will start your blogging way of life with.

Hosted Blogs:

These are blogs that blogging beginners often use. They serve well for practicing and finding out if you’re committed enough to go through the full blog experience. For people that want to check who offer these 2 free blog hosting services I recommend the most:

• Wordpress.com - Wordpress offers the most complete free hosted package. They offer themes, tools for writing, global tag system, Akismet spam killer, and many more.
• Blogger.com - Blogger offers just the basic tools for a new blogger, and its known for being the birthplace of splogs. (Try Wordpress.com before using this one, that’s my recommendation).

Advantages:

• Free - Most options and features are free.
• User friendly - Easy setup, templates provided.
• No experience required - You can run your blog without having any experience, without any pressure to learn how to use the blog before visitors start coming in.
• Good traffic - The host your blog is on is probably already getting a good load of traffic, this may have some good effects on your blog

Disadvantages:

• Less options - You can only do so much with a hosted blog. Since the host controls most of the choices you can have.
• Customizing limits - This means there are only a number of templates for your blog, therefore your blog may end up being one of the design’s “bunch”.
• Sub-Domain - Your blog will be situated in a sub-domain. This means less professionalism, although there are successful bloggers that are on host’s sub-domains.

Self-Hosted Blogs:

If you’re looking for professionalism, and you’re serious about blogging. Self-hosted blogs are right for you. Of course you will need your own domain name and hosting. But you can get them for cheap prices these days. For hosting I recommend Host Gator and for a domain name registrar I recommend Name.com

In this case the only blog platform I’ll recommend is the most popular one of course, Wordpress. Wordpress includes all the features I mentioned before plus the possiblitiies of maximum customization, plugins and networking. Wordpress is definitely the way to go. But you can also check out TypePad and Movable Type if you’re looking for other options.

Advantages:

• Full control - You have full control of everything. Your blog, your rules.
• Customizing - You can mold your blog to any way you want. Meaning themes and plug-ins availability.
• Own domain - If you have a self-hosted blog, you’ll have to have your own domain name. This creates professionalism.

Disadvantages:

• Setup - You yourself have to setup your own blog. But this is not that hard to do, plus there are people who install your blogs for free around the net.
• Upgrading - You need to upgrade your blog software (when the platform requires to do so) yourself.
• Hosting - Your host may go down from time to time. Hosted blogs are less likely to do so.

And that’s it. So which to choose? Hosted or Self-Hosted?

Well my adivise is this. Self-hosted. If you’re serious about blogging (and want to make a little bit of extra money by doing so) you should determine yourself to get a self-hosted blog. Basically what you would be paying is $10 monthly maximum (with cheap hosting) and and $10 yearly for your domain name. In other words this would be an investment. Spend a little bit of time with your blog and play your cards right and you’ll be making money from blogging in no time.