Free Blog Service vs. Hosting Your Own Blog

There are essentially 2 choices to choose from when you start your blog.

You can go with a free blog service like one of these below:

Google’s Blogger
Wordpress.com
Typepad

Or, you could host your own blog (follow my 15 minute guide to starting your own blog).

With the free blog service your blog web address will be something like http://username.blogspot.com.

If you host your own blog, you could choose your own domain name (ie. yourname.com).

Below I have put together a list of features and the pros and cons comparison between free blog service vs. hosting your own blog.

Comparison of free blog service vs. settingup your own blog:

	Free Blog Service	Setting Up Your Own Blog
Cost	Free!	$10/year for domain name and $50/year for web hosting.
Your own .com?	No	Yes
Setup Time	About 5 minutes.	About 15 minutes if you follow my guide.
Themes/Layouts1	Numerous free designs are available.	Numerous free designs are available, with flexibility of designing your custom theme to fit your need.
Plugins2	Limited.	Every plugin that has been developed will be available to you.
RSS syndication3	Available.	Available.
Subscriber List4	Via RSS feed, and can also integrate with 3rd party services like Aweber and Getresponse.	Plugins are available, and can also integrate with 3rd party services like Aweber and Getresponse.

¹Themes/Layouts are basically the face of your blog.  You may consider customizing or design (or have someone else do this for you) your own theme to make your blog stand out from the rest of the blogs out there.

²Plugins are basically extensions to the blog software.  For example, you can add voting functionality to your blog post, show related blog posts at the end of each of your blog post, or even host an auction on your blog.  Plugins are really powerful add-on’s to your basic core blog.

³RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a technology that allows other web publishers or bloggers to syndicate your blog content.  You would want people to syndicate your content to bring you more readers.

⁴Unfortunately a blog doesn’t manage your subscriber list.  You should consider setting up a subscriber or mailing list so that everytime you post a new blog post your readers get notified (usually by email).  A mailing list is great for brining your existing readers back to your blog.

Now that you know the pros and cons of free service vs. setting up your own blog.  Although free blog service may sound enticing and the way to go for starters, your decision may have an impact down the road:

Exit Strategy
If your end goal for starting your own blog is to eventually sell it (ie. treat your blog as a business), then you should consider investing in your own domain name and have it hosted.

Brand Recognition
If branding is important to you, then you would want to build that brand on your own .com domain name – not a free web address like http://xyzCompany.wordpress.com.

Extensibility
Like mentioned previously, not all plugins are made available on free blog services.  If you decide to run a contest on your blog, there may be a contest plugin available that you can use on your own blog that is otherwise unavailable on a free blog.

Ad Control
Some free blog services may force ads on your blog (there is no such thing as a free lunch, just remember that).  Whereas if you host your own blog you are in full control of every aspect of your blog.  You can even control what type of ads to place on there to give you maximum revenue.

The aforementioned should give you plenty to think about before you jump on the blogging wagon.

If you have decided to set up your own blog, be sure to check out my 15 minute guide to starting your own blog.