Blogs: Paid Hosting Services vs. Free Hosting Services

Before your blog can be viewed worldwide, you need to decide whether you are going to use a free blogging host service or a paid blogging host service. Although there are advantages and disadvantages to both, the biggest decision factor will be your blog’s goal. If your blog is a personal blog for family and friends, a free blogging host will probably be adequate. However, if you are planning to monetize your blog or use it to promote a business, a paid blogging host might be better.

When trying to make a decision, there are certain factors you should consider. Here is a list of the advantages and disadvantages of a paid hosting service.

Advantages

• Some people think blogs hosted with a free sevice do look as professional.


• Like businesses, blogs can have a brand too. A brand is a name, sign, or symbol that a consumer associates with his or her overall impression of a product or service. Consequently, it helps a consumer distinguish one company‘s product or service from another company‘s product or service. A blog’s logo, appearance, name, content, and url all help to develop brand. Since a paid service offers a greater degree of customization, it can help build brand more easily. Furthermore, your blog’s name is usually a sub domain of the free hosting company. This makes it harder to develop brand and for your customer to remember your url.


• There is greater control with a paid hosting service. First, free hosting services limit your ability to monetize your blog whereas with paid services the sky is limit. For instance, the free Wordpress does not allow any monetization. Blogger limits it to Adsense. Hubpages allows Adsense, Kontrera, and the opportunities to be an Ebay and Amazon affiliate. However, you only receive 60% of your Adsense profits in exchange for the free hosting platform. Therefore, using a free hosting service can greatly affect your ability to make money with your blog.


• There is greater flexibility with a paid hosting service. You can add more plug-ins.


• There is usually better support with a paid hosting service.


• With free hosting services, there may be a limit in disc space. Therefore you may not be able to add any new content after a certain point.


• With a free hosting service, there may be a limit in bandwith. If your site is too popular, it may be shut down.


• Most free hosting services don’t offer domain based email accounts.


Disadvantages

• You have to pay for a hosting service and the domain.


• Paid hosting services are not as easy to setup and use. You need a knowledge of html in order to customize your blog. Therefore, free hosting services are easier to use.


If you want to monetize your blog, I think the advantages of a paid hosting service far outweigh a free hosting service. With a paid hosting service, you have greater control and more flexibility. Therefore, unless you are certain you don’t want to monetize your blog, I think it is easier to go with a paid hosting service from the beginning.

You get what you pay for - Gabriel Biel

Definitions

Adsense: A contextual advertising program ran by Google.

Blogger: A free blog hosting site owned by Google.

Domain: A unique url that identifies a website.

Bandwith: The speed at which data transfers over a connection in a given time expressed as bps or bits per second.

Affiliate: An advertising program that rewards websites for each customer purchases.

Kontrera: A form of contextual advertising that shows a textbox ad when a keyword is clicked on.

Url: An internet address for a website.