When you want to set up your own blog (and this article is specific to blogs and not static websites) there are several very good reasons from a business point of view why you should use professional hosting. But there are also several equally viable reasons why you should also consider using free blog hosting as well. Here I’ll compare some of the top pros and cons to each.
Reliability
Self hosted blogs have the edge in this respect in that some of the best professional hosting companies will offer you a guarantee of 99.9% uptime for their servers. This is a cast iron guarantee that your blog will be on the air practically continually and any outages will be so few and far between as to be as good as non-existent. You don’t get that guarantee with free blog hosts and if they want to shut down their server and take your blog off the air they can do it whenever they want and for as long as they want and they don’t have to be accountable for it.
Cost
Free blog hosting is the obvious winner here as it is completely free to set up as many blogs as you can handle. Self hosting does cost you a monthly fee, although you can find many good professional hosts for less than $10 a month. This site is hosted with HostGator and that’s all it costs me. On top of that cost is the registration fee for your own domain name which you will also need. This needn’t cost much either as there are places like GoDaddy.com that will register a .com domain for less than $10. This fee also reserves your domain for one year. This is a small price to pay for all the benefits you will receive.
Professionalism
With a professionally hosted blog usually comes a professional sounding domain name, as you have the choice of what you want to call your blog. A free hosted blog name usually comes as a subdomain of the free blog host, so your blog will never sound as professional as your own domain name. There is another side to this in that all traffic that you attract to your blog ultimately benefits the host as far as their Alexa rank and search engine status is concerned, so all your hard promotional work is actually for someone else’s benefit.
Content
In most circumstances, the content that you fill your blog with will be acceptable to both free and paid hosts, but not all. Some free blog hosts will not allow you to put up advertising on your blog – Wordpress being a prime example. Others, like Blogger are fine when it comes to advertising. Another problem with free hosts is that if they decide they don’t like some of the content in your blog for whatever reason they decide, they reserve the right to delete your blog without notice. That is a highly potential hazard when you’ve spend a lot of time and effort to build a really first class blog and obtain a good page rank. All it takes is one post with sensitive content that the owners of the free host don’t like and POOF! Your blog is history!
This is much less likely to happen with a professionally hosted blog, although you can be banned by your host for certain illicit practices like spamming. However, your domain name is yours to keep and along with it it’s page rank and all it’s content which you can simply move to another host if your current host does feel it necessary to ban you. Importantly, they will contact you first so that you are able to transfer your database and content safely an intact should this become an issue.
No such warning needs to be given by free hosts and you instantly lose your blog’s (sub)domain name and with it all page rank and privileges.
Advertising
This follows on from the last point about content in that with a professionally hosted blog you can advertise pretty much whatever you want while some free blog hosts are more restrictive.
Paid Reviews
Currently a controversial subject due to Google’s crackdown on blogs that contain them. However, despite this problem, pro hosted blogs with your own domain name are offered a greater variety of paid reviews to write as many advertisers restrict the platforms they will accept opportunities being written on to mainly full domain names ie www .mydomain.com. For this you will of course need to host your own domain name professionally.
Other restrictions apply to free blogs in the choice of paid review site that will even accept your blog into its system. Notably, LoudLaunch will only accept self hosted domains.
On the flipside, as blogs are being hit with page rank reductions for including paid reviews, it does pay to be setting up a load of free blogs that you can afford to sacrifice to this. By systematically creating a new blog every week for the sole purpose of using it for paid reviews after three months of existence (by which time if you have SEO’d and promoted it correctly it should have attracted some page rank too), they can be used to write as many paid reviews as possible before being rendered useless by the Slap. That way, as one blog goes down another comes ready to take its place. But don’t tell everybody about that idea or they’ll all be doing it!
Ease of use
On both sides, the ease of use is similar. With a pro hosted blog, you will have to go through the stage of installing it onto your server, but with most good hosts providing a simple way to do this with Fantastico you can have a Wordpress blog installed on your server with a few mouse clicks in minutes. Selecting a template is as easy as it is on a free host, as is posting to and managing the blog.
Advanced Use
Both free and pro platforms allow many advanced features like being able to directly edit the template settings and get at the actual HTML and CSS code. However with self hosting you have one more advanced feature that you do not have with free hosted blogs. That is the ability to get into the database directly through MySQL queries or through user panels in phpMyAdmin. Here you have the flexibility to make deeper changes to your blog content that advanced users might be interested in.
For example, if you wanted to use a certain blog for submission to a paid review site but hadn’t posted anything in there for over a month, it would normally not be accepted because of the big gap in posts. From within the database, you can alter the post date of your posts to spread older posts out more evenly so it looks like you’ve posted regularly. That could be construed as being a black hat technique, which it basically is, but if you were desperate to use your blog in this way, now you know how to fiddle with the settings to achieve that!
Well that’s about as much as I want to write about in one rather long post. If I think of other arguments on this subject I’ll publish them in later posts.
So you see there are pros and cons to each method of hosting your blog. The best advice is probably to not keep all your eggs in one basket and spread your blog empire between self hosted for important blogs and free hosted for the simpler ones that you can afford to lose if push comes to shove.
Terry Didcott
The Honest Way
