Most of the new bloggers come face to face with this common question as to which option they should go for – self-hosted blogs or services like WordPress.com and Blogger.com. To get the answer, one must know the difference between self-hosted blogs and free hosted blogs. Let’s try to find that out through a comparative study between the two.
Free Hosted Blogs
There are numerous sites which offer you to start the blog of your own for free and the most notable of them are Blogger.com and WordPress.com. However, they are useful only in some specific circumstances and are marked with their own limitations.
Free blogs are good if you are looking for a blog with a view to share pictures and videos with friends or family. It is also be used by many people as a means of expressing their mind through different writings. It can again be a personal opinion on some news or events that have taken place in recent times. One can also write a short story and post it on the blog if he feels like. So it can no doubt be used for a number of purposes. But one thing which is very common for all these purposes is that whatever is done here would generally fall under non-professional or amateur category.
The greatest drawback of these free blogging sites is that the blogger has least control on them meaning there are numerous restrictions to confine the blogger as to how he would manage the site. First of them is that the URL address must include the free blog name for example “onlineyogateacher.blogger.com” instead of onlineyogateacher.com. You also have the restriction of using the free template sonly.
We all know that SEO is a very useful way to attract traffic towards a website. But unfortunately, this does not work on these free blogging sites due to some technical reasons. To add to the misery the most popular search engine Google seems to have less fondness to the contents on these free blogs vis-à-vis those found in the self-hosted sites.
Self Hosted Blogs
As for the self-hosting blogs the blogger needs to buy his own domain name along with the hosting service but in so doing he gets much more in return including the freedom to manage the website according to his own sweet will.
Here, you can select the theme of your choice as well as come up with other customization as per your mind. This renders your site an enhanced and personalised appearance and thus helps in attracting more visitors.
You are open to utilise the SEO advantages which again helps you to obtain higher ranking in search results. And this is extremely helpful in increasing the traffic. Moreover, you hold the freedom to choose whatever banners or advertisers would be displayed on the site unlike in the free blogging sites.
The Conclusion
So these are the advantages of the self-hosted blogs over the free hosted blogs. To be precise if you are to use the blog for a professional purpose then these differences would really count for you. In fact the free hosted blogs would barely be able to serve your purpose. Yes you will have to pay for those differentiating factors no doubt, but since it is your business, you can easily consider it as a part of the expenditure which is although quite cheap so as to say. It is really a very economic way to attract the attention of clients or customers towards your business endeavor.
