Start A Blog: Free or Paid? WordPress or Blogger?

This article is for those of you who want to start a blog but aren’t sure what the best way to start one might be. We’ll look at helping you answer the following questions and end with an open discussion for questions.

Should I go with a free blog OR spend a little money and purchase my own web hosting?
Which program should I use - WordPress or Blogger?
Where should I host my WordPress Blog?
Conclusion and open discussion.

When I first came to the conclusion that I wanted to start a blog, I treated my decision just like I would any other business venture I might enter into.

The first thing I did was examine what everyone else was using. I quickly noticed most bloggers were using WordPress and had their blog hosted on their own domain (which means they opted to pay for a web hosting account).

I. Starting A Blog: Free or Paid Web Hosting?

If you’re thinking of starting a blog I can almost guarantee this is what’s going through your head:

I want to start a blog but I’m not sure if I’ll like it or not. Maybe I’ll sign up for a free blog on either WordPress.com or Blogger and see how it goes. Then after about a year or so I’ll decide if I should purchase my own domain name and web hosting.

Sound familiar? If so, here’s what you need to consider.

Free hosting, whether it’s for a blog or a normal website is never a good idea unless maybe you’re a kid just fiddling around on the Internet.

Do Not try to build a business online using free web hosting, that just doesn’t make much sense. Don’t get me wrong, as an experienced entrepreneur I do like to get things for free, but not when the deal ultimately will hurt me.

So how can having a free blog hosted on WordPress.com or Blogger hurt you?

Drawbacks To Free Hosting In General

Awhile back I wrote an article entitled, 8+ Drawbacks to Free Web Hosting (link opens in a new tab) which you might find informative. The article shows how free web hosting is limited by such things as:

Bottlenecks - Your hosting/website is shared on 1 server with LOTS of other websites.
Low Bandwidth and Limited Disk Space.
No Personalized Domain Name.
Little Support and more . . .

You’ll Lose All Your Momentum & Lose Backlinks When You Upgrade

If you really feel the need to experience blogging before you purchase a hosting account and are dead set on testing first with a free account, give it no more than two or three weeks tops. If you blog for too long what you’ll find is people will start reading your blog, bookmarking your pages, subscribing to your articles, and linking to your website.

That’s great, right?

Of course! But what happens when you realize you’ve grown beyond a free account? What happens then?

I’ve been blogging for only a year now and have attracted tens of dozens of links and I’m indexed well on Google for a few searches which brings our company business. Could you imagine what would happen if my blog was hosted on a free account and today I decided to move over to a real hosting account with a new web address? I’d lose any search engine traffic I have achieved, dozens (if not hundreds) of websites linking to me would now have broken links, and people who have bookmarked my site may lose touch with me.

Ask any blogger who uses a free account and wants to switch to a paid hosting account what the #1 thing is which holds them back from making the move. I can almost guarantee the above scenario is it!

Free = Bad SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

To better index your website, search engines look at your domain name’s DNS hierarchy. Basically what this means is search engines like Google and Yahoo will look at the web address to your website and translate it into a binary code it can read (0s and 1s).

It then breaks down your web address and assigns an order of importance for the purpose of locating and addressing your website in the search engine. Let’s take a look at this hierarchy.

For this first example, let’s say you decided to pay for your own web hosting and domain name of www.your-blog.com. Here’s how your domain’s DNS hierarchy will be indexed by search engines:

DNS Hierarchy Paid Hosting

Alternatively, if you choose to host your blog on WordPress or Blogger, your web address will look something like www.your-blog.wordpress.com and here’s how it will be indexed:

DNS Hierarchy Free Blog Hosting

This means you’re doing a lot of work to help WordPress index their site better first and then work to help index your website in search engines.

II. Should You Use Blogger or WordPress?

Well if you just read the information above then by default you would go with WordPress as Blogger is only offered free and not bundled with any paid hosting (as far as I know).

But to give you a more adequate answer as to why you should use WordPress vs. Blogger as your blogging platform, I’d like to point out 4 good reasons.

The majority of bloggers use WordPress. It’s ok to be different (in business), but because so many people use WordPress it will be much easier to find help (and you can always email me and ask questions).
Simplicity of commenting on articles. Have you ever tried to comment on a blog using Blogger? It makes me want to pull my hair out! With WordPress your visitor will simply read your article and comment using the form at the bottom. Nice, easy, simple, and promotes comments and community.
You can do a lot of cool things with WordPress. Because of the popularity of WordPress and being that its source code is open, thousands of people constantly write programs called plugins which you can use to make your site truly unique and fun. With Blogger, you’re pretty much stuck with what they give you and a few customized themes.
Your blog can be converted into an actual professional-looking website for a business very easily, not so with Blogger.

III. Where To Find WordPress Web Hosting

This one is easy. If you’re reading this, you’ve arrived at a great place to have your WordPress blog hosted online - eVentureBiz WordPress Web Hosting (link opens in a new tab).

As CEO of eVentureBiz, I have gone to many lengths to make sure all your blogging needs will be taken care of in order to start blogging right away.

All our hosting plans include an option to easily install WordPress within your web hosting control panel and you can have it pre-installed at time of web hosting sign up. Plus if you contact me I will personally:

Install your WordPress blog free of charge.
Upload and install your choice of WordPress Theme free of charge.
Upload and install various customizations (plugins) I find useful - free of charge.
Fortify your WordPress installation to help hacker-proof your blog (see my article on WordPress security) - free of charge.
Provide a 30-Day money back guarantee.
Ask questions and get help anytime by emailing me, commenting on this blog, or posting in our community forums.

Check out our eVentureBiz WordPress Web Hosting page for more information.

IV. Conclusion & Discussion

I think I’ve made a pretty good case that the best choice for starting a blog in most cases will be to go with a paid web hosting account using WordPress as your blogging platform.

There are other blogging platforms out there which I did not mention in this article, like TypePad, Movable Type, b2evolution, etc. However, at this time the two most popular are WordPress and Blogger.

If you’re wanting to start a blog and have questions, please comment below. If you’re a current blogger, which blogging platform do you use and do you like it?

Share And Enjoy

Rita
on 21 Oct 2008 at 11:01 am #

John,

Sorry to go off-topic, but I loved the line you wrote on Cath Lawson’s blog comment: “A confused mind always says no.”

I thought it was brilliant!

Rita

Rita’s last blog post..Average Children, Mean Parents

John Hoff
on 21 Oct 2008 at 4:24 pm #

Hi Rita. Yep, that is something I’ve always gone by and always try to remember in sales.

Cath Lawson
on 22 Oct 2008 at 1:30 pm #

Hi John - Anyone who starts a blogspot blog is crackers. I did it to see if I liked it and never again. I barely got any traffic at all. And blogger is so limited in comparison to Wordpress.

But the really big thing is - you have no control. It isn’t really your blog - Google owns it and they can shut it down when they want.

I started my first website on the free bizhosting.com - don’t know if it’s still on the go. It was a huge mistake. I made money from it - as there wasn’t a lot of competition then. But had bizhosting known I was making money, they’d have shut me down.

Plus I had to put up with their hideous clashing, flashing banner ads everywhere. Now, if I’d started that site on a paid for host instead of a free one, it would be a huge business today. Sites that were similar to mine that used paid hosting are getting hundreds of thousands of visitors a month. That should be enough reason for anyone not to consider a free site or blog.

Cath Lawson’s last blog post..You Can Overcome Lack Of Self Confidence

John Hoff
on 22 Oct 2008 at 10:02 pm #

Hi Cath. You bring up a great point. If you host your blog on Blogger or WordPress.com you don’t own your blog, Google and WordPress does.

About 6 months ago I created a Blogger account just to see what it was like and let me tell ya, after using WordPress for awhile Blogger clearly wasn’t for me.

Your example of how you tried starting a business with a free account is a common mistake many new entrepreneurs make. I frequent Yahoo Answers and when you type in the search box “web hosting” you’ll see nearly 80% or so are people looking for “the best place to find free web hosting” because they want to start a business.

For some reason they feel starting a “business” with a free web hosting account is ok. I’ve tried showing new entrepreneurs how that’s not the way to go but many don’t want to listen to an experienced professional. All I can do then is wish them luck.

The only time I would build a business on something free is if it came free to me through trade or some special circumstance . . . like a prize I won.

Barbara Swafford
on 27 Oct 2008 at 10:51 pm #

Hi John - As you know I’m a blogger who started with WordPress from the beginning. I also went with a web host. I’m extremely happy about my decision and certainly would not want to have to make a major change now considering I have over 300 posts and a page rank of 4.

Barbara Swafford’s last blog post..A.S.K. Darren Rowse of Problogger - When Do We Know Our Blog Is A “Winner”

John Hoff - eVentureBiz
on 28 Oct 2008 at 4:27 am #

That really would be a pain if you had to transfer all that to a web host and lose your PageRank if you were on a free account. Your blog is really taking off, Barbara - congratulations on that. Of all the blogs I frequent, yours and Cath’s comment sections are the most lively and has a great sense of community.