Where Should You Host Your Blog?
Should you host your blog yourself or pay someone to host it? It doesnt matter if youre a newbie or a veteran this question always comes up when creating a new blog. Usually someone new to blogging would gravitate to hosting a blog themselves or get a free blog and as time goes by with experience they begin to ponder maybe paid blog hosting isnt so bad after all. So what is better?
To answer this question, lets first look at how a blog is created. Just like creating web pages, first, you need a software or script that will take your entries, format it and publish it to the web. The second component of a blog, is the web space, where the software should publish to, a home for the blog pages.
Knowing this information, lets review the different ways to host a blog:
Full blog host. This is where the blogging system or software is provided for you and your blog is also published to a web space provided by the host. Blogger, SquareSpace and Typepad fall into this category. Its very much like creating a website with a site builder.
Hosted blog software but published elsewhere This is where the blog software is provided for you but the blog pages are published to another website or web host altogether. By doing this, the software acts as a publishing system like FrontPage except it creates nicely formatted blogs. Blogger is probably the most well known for this. Yes Blogger can do both. Publish to their host or to yours. As a comparison, this is like using FrontPage to publish your website.
Blog software and blog are hosted on your web server This is where you would install the blog script (software) on your web server it can be any web hosting account. And when you publish, the blog itself resides on your web server also. To draw a parallel, this technique is like buying web hosting and then installing a content management system on it to help you build web pages.
If youre new to building web pages or have built sites using site builders then you might want to go with a fully hosted blog. These hosts do all the nitty gritty for you and theres very little technical stuff you need to know. If you can point and click, you can build a blog with a full blog host.
Having said that, just because youre seasoned at building web pages doesnt mean full blog hosts wont work for you. In fact, if you have many blogs this becomes very appealing since you wont have to worry about upgrading the blog script, people exploiting the script, making plug-ins work or what happens when your web host decides to disable part of your blog functions because there is a security hole. All you do is concentrate on blogging. After a while, blogging becomes more important than maintaining your blog and thats the way it should be.
Next up, hosted software but blog is published to your website. This seems to be the best of both worlds. At time of writing, Blogger is one of the best ways to do this but because of its popularity often, you find the system too slow to publish or completely down just when you have a hot idea to share. The idea is good but youll also be depending on someone elses availability to publish your blog. Its much like using a friends computer to build your web pages and you know how that can go.
Finally, you have the option to use scripts. This is also a very popular method. The flexibility it allows is very liberating because you can mould the blog anyway you want. You can even get a programmer to create custom plug-ins or customize the whole blogging system the way you want it. In short, you can do pretty much anything you want.
The down side, you need at the very basic, some knowledge of HTML or publishing web pages. Also the burden of upgrading, troubleshooting and maintaining the script is on you. If you have one or two blogs its not so bad but once you start having more, it can be quite tedious. You also have to consider all the other responsibilities of maintaining the script as mentioned earlier.
Armed with this information, you should be able to figure out which one is for you. If youre still undecided, think of how you would do it if youre creating a regular website. Chances are your choice method for publishing a website is also the best method for you to create a blog.
About The Author: Lynette Chandler helps entreprenuers start blogging and make the most of their blogs. Get a free video how to set up your blog at http://www.BloggingStarterPack.com
Keywords: blogging, business, hosting, wordpress, blogger
About the Author
Lynette Chandler,
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Lynette Chandler helps marketers make the most of technology in their marketing. Technology's place in a business goes beyond using computers or having a website. Learn what and how to implement TechBasedMarketing at www.TechBasedMarketing.com
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