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Thread: Paid Hosting or Free Hosting?

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    Default Paid Hosting or Free Hosting?

    A lot of people who write blogs swear by Blogger and other free hosting solutions. Others are adamant that they would never host their blog anywhere but on a domain that they own. Which side of the fence are you on?

    As for me, my two personal blogs and the AFHW blog are Wordpress blogs and are privately hosted. The corporate blogs I write are all privately hosted in house. I do write one blog that is hosted on Blogger, but that is more because the organization is new and cash poor than because we want to host the blog on Blogger.

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    Default Paid Hosting

    I first started out using Blogger. Within a few days I switched to Wordpress.com and within a few days switched to Wordpress.org. I knew immediately what I wanted out of blogging and free hosting is very limited. You have much more control over your blog with paid hosting.

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    Free hosting is fine if your blog is a personal one. In general if you're looking at the blog as part of your business I'd suggest hosting it yourself. The free options do limit you from doing some things.

    If your blog is part of your business you're going to want more control over the files for marketing/seo purposes and you're probably going to want to install some addons that require you to host site yourself.
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    Definitely paid hosting. Blogger is owned by Google, which means Google can and does change the rules whenever they feel like it, and they have that right. What right do you have with free hosting? None!

    I prefer WordPress for the programming, but would not recommend a free site for hosting. Even for personal use, you never own the material unless you pay for hosting. This could lead to some unexpected problems later, and with cost only around $7 a month, it's just not worth going free.
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    One advantage that I can see to Blogger is that they make adding photos and videos and such things pretty plug and play.

    Both my personal blogs are privately hosted and are Wordpress blogs but I really don't have much of a clue about how to make them work. If I didn't have Vangogh's help, my blogs would still be broken. It also seems to be more a hurdle to add pictures and other things, although Wordpress seems to be trying to make it easier.

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    I think WP is more of a learning curve, but Blogger is much more limiting.
    Steve Chittenden

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    "Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." -- Theodore Roosevelt

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    The benefits of the free hosted blogs is ease of setup and use. That's why for personal blogs I think they're fine. It's probably not too big a deal in those cases if the rules change.

    But for a business it's worth taking the time on the learning curve and it's not as though WordPress is all that hard to figure out. It's still pretty easy even if a few things here and there you need to ask for help.
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    I personally have gone the path of WordPress, on my own hosting, this is more so that i had the space, and domains available already, then even thinking about the cost. Because when i setup my hosting for my business website, i signed on for a reseller account which gave me ability to host other domains.

    At the end of the day i prefer the flexibility of having my own hosting, however if it was purely a personal blog, which i was not planning to monetize at some point in the future then there is a very good chance that i would just go and setup on blogger. It is a hard question with pros and cons on both sides of the argument.
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