Hi guys,
I would like to start up my own blog. I am wondering if people can give me any advice on which blog hosting company I should go with, and what features I might be able to enjoy, etc.
I would also like to keep the option open of (hopefully!) making some money off of my blog, some day. Can this be done with traditional blog hosting companies?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Well I’m a long time blogger and have used various services out there. From what you said I’d recommend either Blogger, Typepad, or if you want to run it on your own server somewhere, MoveableType. The latter two being products of Six Apart, and Blogger being owned by Google.
Blogger has a free service but it quickly can become chafing for those who are more serious about blogging. But both Blogger and Typepad also provide ‘premium’ accounts where you pay a monthly fee and get file hosting (such as images and such) and total control over your blog template.
As for making money, any company you go with should be okay with it. I’ve never heard of anyone disallowing Google AdWords or such. If you’re referring to something more like a business related to your blog, then it might be something to research though.
Hope this helped. Oh, and all services I mentioned are at their name + .com
General Questions is for questions with factual answers. IMHO is for opinions and polls.
I’ll move this to IMHO for you.
DrMatrix - GQ Moderator
How does one make money off of a blog?
Given its massive vulnerabilities to spam, via comments, trackbacks and sent from your server via your comments form, not to mention recent licensing debacles which proved that the company’s business acumen is sorely lacking, I’d avoid Movable Type like the plague. Go for an open source, community-supported solution, like WordPress, Textpattern or pMachine.
Ads. There are a number of different systems out there, AdSense being the most popular. There are some more “targeted” applicaitons though.
I use blogger. They’ve got some interesting ideas on how to combat comment spam (and thus no one bothers to try), but any number of clicks through the random blog generator will show you that SOE/spam blogs are doing quite well.
As for MT vs. blogger: it seems to me that the most popular blogs tend to use MT. LJ and Blogger are for different purposes: LJ has an interesting focus on community and Blogger is good for…just because.
I’m not familiar with other systems, but Blogger always seems to have something wrong with it - this will probably never be a problem for the average user though.
However, Blogger does have the advantage of most likely to be free the longest (IMO at least) and there are no bandwidth requirements (not that a standard blog is going to shut any site down), but embedding images can be done with any number of excellent free methods. So, you can have essentially free hosting. The downside is that you’ve got a X.blogspot.com address which may or may not bother you.
In case it wasn’t clear, my vote is for Blogger. If you decide that you want to try something else, you can always start a new one. Plus, you don’t have to mess with configuring servers or etc. If you decide that you want to move to your own domain, it’s a simple matter to port over your old blogger entries and still post.
While trackbacks are nice, setting up a technorati profile is simple - and you’ve eliminated that opportunity for spam. The only feature that I’d really like to see added to Blogger is categories.
It’d also be nice for them to get the post-by-email feature working again.
Thanks for your input guys.
I’ve gone with blogger.com