As blogging becomes more popular than people expected, more and more individuals and businesses are setting up blogs for many reasons. A vast majority of these new blogs are hosted on free blog hosting sites. This can bring more expected problems than it is worth.
For a beginner, free blog hosting can be a brilliant starting point. Without having to spend anything a blog can be setup to try blogging. The problem is that free hosts bring unexpected problems.
The first problem that a many free hosts in the past have faced is that the host is out to make money. If the free blog hosting is not making them money, they will just stop it and leave you out in the cold. This has happened before and it will happen again.
The second problem is uptime. Many of the free blog hosts also run paid services. When they have a problem, they will work on getting the paid service back running before they care about the free hosting. This means that your blog will have more down time and may lose visitors.
Once your blog starts to grow, you might look into making a bit of money with advertisements. If you are lucky enough to be on a host that allows you to place advertisements on your site, you still may run into problems. Free blog hosts always want something and in most cases they want to use the best advertising space at the top of your blog. How is your advertisement going to be seen when people are seeing your hosts advertisement first.
If your blog does become large enough that it prompts your to move hosts, you may find that this too will be a minefield of problems. Moving hosts means changing the URL that your blog is found at. If your free host does not allow this to be redirected, you may have to start your blog all over again, losing your regular visitors.
By all means, use free blog hosts to try out blogging, but if you are serious do not expect that you can get away without paying for a more professional blog host.
Written by Mary Nicole Hicks. Read her latest article "Bad blog posts" at http://www.pickbrains.com/articles/bad-blog-posts You can reprint this article as long as you link to http://www.pickbrains.com/ |
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