Choosing a Blog Platform - Start Your Engines!
Choosing where and how you want to setup your Blog is a lot like choosing a smartphone or a DayTimer. You are going to want to find one that suits your needs and styles because if it’s clumsy, hard to use, or inflexible, just like your DayTimer, you will find excuses not to use it. But, choose wisely, and you’ll find you can’t live without it!
I won’t include lack of ‘technical skill’ as an excuse because today, setting up blogs on websites is very simple, even if you have never done it before, and I will include a future article on setting up a WordPress Blog from Scratch, the manual way, if you want complete control over your blog and are willing to give it a shot!
Commercially Hosted vs. Self-Hosted
One of the great things about blogging today is that you can get started right away, for free, and get to writing about anything you want! There’s nothing to stop you from getting started but your imagination and an internet connection. What you first need to decide is where you will setup your blog, and by ‘where’ we mean the physical space or place where your blog will reside. Your first decision will be to choose whether you will setup your blog / website on a a free hosted account or whether you will setup your own private account with a web host.
Pros & Cons of Self-Hosted vs. Commercially Hosted Blogs
There are several benefits and drawbacks to each platform decision. Here is a quick outline:
| Commercially Hosted | Self-Hosted | |
| Cost | Free or cheap depending on features | Costs involve domain name, hosting, starting at $75/year, give-or-take |
| Setup Time | Within Minutes… Select a name, a template, and you’re ready to go | Time involved to setup hosting account, register domain name, and configure blog software (about an hour) |
| Maintenance | Updated Automatically | You must manage updates to blogging software and plugins, customizations, etc. |
| Search Engines | Can be included in global ‘pool’ of search results | Can customize search engine optimization (SEO) with plugins and techniques that may not be available on commercial platforms |
| Configuration Options | Limited to what plugins, themes, and other customizations are available by the host | Total access to customizations, including themes, plugins, counters, and any modifications available to the platform’s development community. |
| URL Options | May be limited to an extension of the platform’s URL, i.e. http://yourname.blogsite.com | Choose whatever domain name you want. Blog may also be under your site’s main name, i.e. www.yoursite.com/blog |
| Ownership | You do not have total control over your content or availability of the site goes down and you cannot transfer your site if the name is part of their system | You can upgrade, backup, transfer, or maintain your site whenever and wherever you want. |
Decision Time
You can choose to setup a free blog on one of the commercially hosted platforms for fun, just to get your feet wet, and familiarize yourself with the system. For instance, you can setup a family site with a journal, photos, and personal pages for each member of the family. These sites include Blogger (an extension of the Google Apps platform) Wordpress.com (The commercially hosted version of the WordPress blogging engine) and TypePad (a paid-service with a low-entry fee with a healthy developer and support community and many pro-options as well including collaborative blogging, cross-linking, and search engine optimization.
Once you get familiar with the system, you can stick with a commercial platform if you wish for the sites you wish to make money from, or you can take the next step and get your own complete website. as I mentioned before, I will be creating a new article on how to setup your own blog from scratch using a hosted platform for those of you who want complete control over your domain and website options. Just for a personal recommendation, I have been using PowWeb since just about the time they were created, and I have never regretted it. They have continually improved their services, reduced their costs, and improved in their reliability through the years and today they are a rock-solid web provider. More on that later, but I thought I’d just mention it since they are the reason you are reading this article right now!
So, start your engines! Decide to setup a blog today for free right now, or take the time to get a good domain name and setup a Self-Hosted or TypePad account and let’s get creative together!
Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for others on what’s important when selecting a blogging platform. What did you decide and what platform did you choose? Let us know, and leave us a link to your blog as well!
See you online!
-Anthony
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