Free Or Self-Hosted Blogs?
The time we live in is better regarded as a time where everyone wants to enjoy everything but in an easy way. We have created an easier and better substitute for everything from sports and home entertainment to clothes and even the things that we eat. Just like everything else, creating websites is also transforming to an easier class known as blogs. Blogs provide a user with the ability to create a personalized website that contains content based on the time and date a specific content is published on.
If you want to create a blog of your own, there are two broad choices that you have, namely free blogs and self hosted blogs. Although both of these options are well suited for publishing blogs on the web, both have their own benefits as well as negatives. Given below is a brief of both of these options for hosting blogs:
Free Blog
Using free blog services is the easiest and the most popular method used by millions of bloggers around the world. In order to create a free web blog, users have to first register on a free blogging platform with their personal details and fill in some other necessary information like the blog name. Some of the most popular free blogging platforms are Blogger/BlogSpot, TypePad and WordPress. After creating a username and password in these services, users can start right away with their blogs. In free blogging services like blogger, users can also login directly using their Google account username and password and start creating multiple blogs under a single blogger account.
While these websites do provide the ability to create blogs for free, they also restrict a user in performing various administrative tasks that are allowed to a certain degree under the user domain only. Even though websites like blogger provide the ability to add customized HTML tags to the blog theme, other free blogging platforms do not provide the ability to do so. Other restrictions involve a sub domain like blog.blogger.com or blog.wordpress.com and specify that a blog is hosted on blogger or wordpress. If you have a wordpress or blogger account, there are various themes you can choose from but the number of free themes is limited and all the good themes come with a big price tag.
Self Hosted Blog
Even though it is advised that you start your blog with a free blog to get a feel of the blogging business, you can eventually turn to the flexible and fully manageable self hosting solution. As already stated, unlike free blogs, self hosted blogs provide greater control over a blog and should be your first choice if you have funds. The biggest benefit that is provided by a self hosted blog is its ability to add HTML tags wherever a user wants. By adding custom tags, users can add pages, select individual themes for selected pages and even provide restrictions on page views.
With the facility to perform any action to a weblog, using the self hosted option is the best choice out of two but comes with the added disadvantage of being a costly solution.