Choosing Your Blog Host

Blog writing is definitely one of the best ways that you can use to get information across to people. In fact, blogging have become a very crucial tool that many organizations have incorporated it into their information campaigns. However, a blog would end up becoming totally useless if you don't know where to put it up in the web.

And that's where the blogging platform, or blog host, comes in. Choosing the right blog host to get yours online can really mean the difference between getting read and being just another of those unknowns on the web. But, this isn't going to be easy, since there is many blog hosting sites available online.

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And even before that, you need to think about whether to get a hosting site or put it online yourself. The main advantage of hosting a blog yourself is that you have total control of how it operates. You can even set restrictions to further limit or delimit access to your blog. The main disadvantage with this one is that you actually need to own a server or at least a computer that can handle all the incoming traffic. Besides, you will have to pay for the space to put it on the web, i.e. you have to buy your own domain name. And both can be quite expensive. Thus, this one is more suited for corporate blogs or those kids who can afford them.

For the rest of us, there are plenty of free hosting sites out there. Here are two of the more popular ones and the pros and cons of getting each.

Blogger is, by far, the leader of the pack in terms of market share. The main draw of the site is its ease of set up. In fact, all you need to do is to click the large “Create your blog now” button and it will automatically whisk you to the blog creation page. Creating your initial blog post is also very straightforward ad intuitive. The best part of using Blogger is that you can tweak the CSS code to add more style to your blog's overall appearance.

The only downside with the site is that it has no categories to sort your entries. This can be especially problematic when organizing your posts, but nonetheless, this doesn't deter from Blogger's other features.

Coming in close is Wordpress (both the .com and the .org). Though this site doesn't really allow you to customize your blog (its major drawback) in much the same way as Blogger gives, it still has plenty to offer which compensates a lot for it. For one, it offers real categories so you won't get too confused in sorting your posts.

Second, and more important, Wordpress allows you a greater deal of traffic management. The site has a built statistics analyzer, so you can determine how much traffic is actually going to your blog. It also offers users a good spam protection system so you wouldn't need to worry about your blog being flooded by junk comments.

There are still other blog hosts that you can try out. But for the most part, these two will surely be the best ones available.

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