Beginner Intro: What blogging platform to choose?
July 21, 2008
So on our last post we hopefully gave you some encouragement and you’ve decided to start a blog. Now which blogging platform should you choose?
You have some options here:
You can choose one of the free ones, and here you have a whole range of offers like Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog.com and you can search google for more if you want. Any of those sites allow you to quickly register and have a blog going in less than 5 minutes, all sites also have extensive help and support and overall it’s really very simple.
The other option is to go for a blog hosted on your own webspace and with your own domain. This will set you back about $5 or $10 per month for hosting and another $10 per year for a domain name. But once you have your own hosting account you can install from a whole plethora of blogging platforms, content management systems, forums, wikis, simple HTML sites, anything you want. Most of the times you can install those applications on your webspace just by clicking a couple of menu options on the hosts administration panel.
Now my personal recommendation is a self hosted wordpress blog. Wordpress is a very good platform, it’s extremely easy to work with and very easily extensible with thousands of themes and plugins. The reason for recommending a self hosted one is because you can host a lot more than just blogs if you have your own hosting space.
So if you’re not familiarized with any blogging platform, then just signup for a quick blog at Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and get to know it, and then with time go for the self hosted option if you wish.
If you’re set on getting you own hosting here’s a list of some of the top webhosts, you’ll have to research them if you’re looking for the best price and features because they are constantly updating their prices and promotions, but there won’t be a very significant difference as all of them offer very cheap starter packages that should do just fine.
- 1and1
- AN Hosting
- Apollo Hosting
- Blue Host
- Hostgator
- Hostmonster
- Hostrocket
- iPower
- iPowerWeb
- JumpLaunch
- LunarPages
- midPhase
- Netfirms
- PowWeb
- ServerPronto
- StartLogic
- Web Hosting Pad
- Yahoo! Webhosting
From this list I’ve personally used Hostgator, Blue Host, and Lunarpages. I never had any problems with any of them but your mileage may vary.
On our next post we’ll assume you have started blogging with wordpress and discuss a little about how to customize it, the best plugins, themes and more. Stay tuned.