Self Hosted vs Free Blogs

Blogging is about freedom. You all know that there are too many blogging service out there. The most famous are

WordPress.com
Blogger.com
TypePad.com
And hundreds more…

Those are free blogging service that serves and gives you single or multiple subdomains that you can manage both the posts content and the theme for.
But after WordPress.org was born, there are so many

Blogging is about freedom. You all know that there are too many blogging service out there. The most famous are

1. WordPress.com
2. Blogger.com
3. TypePad.com
4. And hundreds more…

Those are free blogging service that serves and gives you single or multiple subdomains that you can manage both the posts content and the theme for.

But after WordPress.org was born, there are so many blogs which ran with their own domain on their web hosting services. Usually called self hosted blogs. Self hosted blog has a simpler address name and the permission of all access to their PHP, sub-domains, Error pages, and many more…

Address Example:
Free Blog : http://myname.wordpress.com
Self Hosted : http://myname.com
Sorry, i guess you already know about this

However, self hosted blog is not as sophisticated as Free blog in the beginning. Building self hosted blog needs some extra if you want it to be as good asWordPress.com (for example) They are:

1. Domain registration
2. Hosting package that relevant to you
3. Paid hosting which enable Sendmail, PHPMyAdmin, and FSockOpen
4. BandWidth
5. CPU

Now, how about free blogging? Think about this. Free bloggings are accessed by a big amount of people. If the member registered is 1000, and each of them allowed to make 3 blogs, the server runs 3000WordPress blogs. That big amount of blog, especially WordPress platform, need a lot of capacity, bandwidth, and CPU to run. So the administrator have to install the best hosting package to run those.

Besides best hosting package, there are some feature you have with free hosting than self hosted blog by default, they are:

1. Email notification
2. Google Connect
3. WordPress.com new post and popular post
4. Big amount of file storage
5. Big amount of database for posts
6. Very rare downtimes
7. Selectable Themes

So, my conclusion is, there are a lot of free blogging out there. If you want blogging for fun, they are the best place, and have very good service to meet your achievement. If you blogging for other purpose (like company profile or others) then self hosted is the right choice.

But keep in mind that self hosted blog may need your attention instead of blogging, for example, server error, database backup, reach maximum bandwidth, downtimes, and paying