Blog Hosting

Thinking about starting a blog? One of the first steps is deciding where you are going to host your blog. There are basically two different ways to host your blog. You can create your own site and install a blog platform on your site or you can join a site that will host the blog for you.

WordPress and Blogger are the major blog hosting sites.

Blogger is best for a newly starting blogger. It is a site run by Google so if you have a Gmail address you are already set to go. Setting up a blog literally takes 2 minutes. All you have to do is pick the name of your blog, pick your unique URL and choose how your blog will look. Once you have picked those settings you can start posting right away.

The advantages of Blogger favor beginners to the blogging world. Setting up your blog is very simple and quick. Picking a template is as easy as checking a check box. All the elements of the page are displayed in a user-friendly control panel. To move an ad to a different place on the page is done by dragging it to a different place. There are many different widgets you can place on your blog. If you want to add a list of links or a picture slide show or a list of all your blog posts, all you have to do is select the widget you want and add it to your blog. Then you will be able to drag it around to place it.

There are some disadvantages to hosting your blog on Blogger. One is the URL of the blog will be unique, but it will also contain ".blogspot.com" after your unique keyword. (eg www.johnsblog.blogspot.com) Another thing is you cannot customize the layout and template of your blog as much as you can with WordPress. It is possible to get a Blogger template that resembles a WordPress template, but they aren't as commonly available.

Basically Blogger is great for the newly beginning blogger. It creates a very user friendly environment for creating a blog without requiring much knowledge of any code such as HTML or CSS.

WordPress is targeted more towards a experienced blogger. WordPress has a site that is exactly like Blogger. It has many of the same features.

However, when most people think of WordPress it is using it in a different way. You can download a folder of html documents that you need to upload to your own website. Obviously this means you will need to buy a domain name, find hosting and then upload the files to your site. Once you have done that you can install WordPress on your own site.

This means you will need to have some experience with HTML and CSS in order to get the blog set up correctly. The advantages of WordPress are that you have much more control over your blog. You can make it look like whatever you want. WordPress has a feature called plugins that allows you to install some code to your blog. The codes will do different things on your blog much like the widgets on Blogger.

The disadvantages to the new blogger is that you will need to know how to buy a domain and get it all setup. As opposed to Blogger, which can be setup in 5 minutes.

Consider your intentions and experience with blogging in order to pick the best option for you.