City Grocery

Many people are confused whether they should get into hosting a blog on their own site or hosting it in one of the major blog hosting sites, like WordPress.com, Blogger, Typepad, MySpace, LiveJournal etc. However, your choice can differ for each of the sites.

WordPress.com: It is a great platform, which offers free web hosting as well as it is the most popular webhostingrating site. They promote a strict ‘non-commercial use’ policy. There are many instances of blogs being deleted, without warning, without recourse, or even without being sent a copy of the data backup. Moreover, WordPress offers a commercial-grade web hosting service, while with a monthly charge of $300, it is certainly not aimed at the small trades. This way, WordPress is great for personal blogs, but when it comes to your business, WordPress may not be suitable at all.

Blogger.com: It is an authoring service, which can give you enough leeway to either host the blog on your own site or on the Blogspot.com, and that too for free. It actually deserves credit for bringing the concept of blogging into the mainstream business. However, they don’t have the strict anti-commercial policy as the WordPress.com. And for this reason, splogging is a big problem with this site. This site restored their blogs with no loss of content or data, but it normally takes 2 to 3 days.

Typepad.com: It is a purely blog hosting service, and not a full-fledged web hosting service. You can host commercial blogs on your own domain and that too at a cheap rate of $4.95 per month, which includes all the basic services. But one problem with this site is that Typepad.com does not allow their clients to customize their template or even run it on their own domain. To fetch this service, you have to pay more, $8.95 a month. Moreover, you can get full-fledged service of blog hosting, which in turn supports nixblog hosting for around $7 per month or even less. And since it is a blog hosting service, you can get any upgrades to the product automatically. In this way, Typepad.com is good for personal blogs but not for your business at all.

MySpace, LiveJournal and other blog-based community- Sometimes, the blog-based community, like LiveJournal or MySpace, can profe beneficial for you, if you are aimed at the this market. All of the successful internet marketers as well as affiliate marketers on MySpace are using their blogs. And most of them have their own blogs on their own sites too, but they also use the blogs within MySpace as a marketing channel. These sites have ‘non-commercial use’ clauses in their terms of service just as WordPress.com, however neither of them has ever enforced it. Basically, they enforce it only in order to delete real spammers.

After all the discussions, it can be said that blog hosting on your own site is the best option for your blog, if you intend to promote your business, and only if you already have a web site