Free Blogs vs. Roll Your Own
Should you host your own blog or use a free blog service like Blogger.com or WordPress.com? Free does have the advantage of being, well, free, but there are some limitations on using free blogs, especially when it comes to commercial purposes and blog customization. You could spend endless hours, months, and years building up an entire business on a free blog only to wake up one day and it’s gone. Good luck trying to get a reason out of support, provided they give support on free blogs.
Free blogs are pretty good for learning how to run a blog. In my humble opinion, I suggest going with WordPress.com if you’re new to blogging and want to get your feet wet.
Blogger.com, which is owned by Google, has a horrible editor.
- It has no spell checker.
- It inserts extra blank lines between paragraphs when you go back in to edit a post.
- It has neither Paste From Text nor Past From Word function so if you paste from something that had formatting in it, it brings the formatting with it.
- It has no in-dent/out-dent so if you want to indent more deeply on bulleted items, you can’t.
I would expect more out of Google, but apparently they don’t care. I pull my hair out every time I try to use Blogger.
Best advice? Don’t use a free blog service for commercial purposes.
| Features | Free Blog Services | Privately Hosted Blogs |
|---|---|---|
| Price of blogging software | Free | Free |
| Theme selection | Limited | Exhaustive |
| Commercial content | WordPress.com prohibits: "... commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites..." Blogger allows: Amazon | Allowed |
| Advertising | WordPress.com: Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are not permitted on WordPress.com blogs. Blogger.com: Allows AdSense. | Allowed |
| Removal | Can delete your blog without warning or reason regardless of content. You don't own the blog, they do. | Not unless you REALLY screwed up by posting illegal content violating the hosting company's terms of service. |
| Number of blogs allowed | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Use 3rd party plug-ins | No | Yes |
| Insert custom HTML or Javascript | WordPress: No, they'll strip it out. Blogger: Yes, with a widget. | Yes |
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