Hosting your blog

Perhaps there are many reasons to why you would want to host your blog instead of using the freely available blogging platforms such as Blogger, Wordpress or Livejournal. Hosting your blog means to use a web hosting service instead of the default domain hosting provided by the free blogging sites. On top of that you need to be using a blogging software or platform such as Wordpress.

Branding

If you have blogged on any free blogging sites before you would likely to notice that the domain name of your blog might be considerably long because of the non-removable name prefix of the blogging site. For example: mypcgamereviews.blogspot.com. In addition, you won’t be able customize it in the sense that you want to leave out the blogging site’s name in the URL – to cut it short to mypcgamereviews.com for instance.

One reason why you would want to host your blog is because of branding. It gives you that personal touch or professional look. It is like you yourself having mypcgamereviews as a company name. Do consider to choose a different and unique domain name though, because your blog visitors might be mixed up with a similarly named one. If you planned to monetize your blog you wouldn’t want to lose your visitors.

Wordpress

You will need blogging software if you want to host your blog. Wordpress is one of the best that you can use. Wordpress is an open source platform that is free to use. Open source allows for contributions from numerous developers or programmers to constantly improve and enhance its features. Some of these features are plugins and themes that are distributed freely. Wordpress is supported by many web hosting service as well. Read more about Wordpress here.

Domain Name & Web Hosting

Before you are able to host your blog, you will need a domain name and web host. There are a lot of domain name registration and web hosting services that you can find on the Internet. One of the very popular one would be GoDaddy. The pricing goes from as low as USD1.49 per year for domain name and USD4.99 per month for web hosting. I am not in any way affiliated with GoDaddy. It’s the easiest example that I could give because of their popularity. Just log on www.godaddy.com to check it out.

In conclusion, the main reason why you would want to host your blog is because of branding and the additional useful features that you can use from blogging software. This is very beneficial for monetized blogs. You can still monetize from free blogging platforms but you wouldn’t want to miss plugins related to SEO and so on.