When you are ready to start your blog one of the first tasks is to choose a blogging platform. Basically, there are two kinds of platforms – a hosted and a non-hosted platform. I will explain each one and which direction I recommend. The great news here is that this is not going to cost you much – most blogging platforms are free or just a few dollars a month.
What Does Hosting Mean?
Before we get into hosted versus non-hosted let’s explain what hosting means exactly. Every web site, whether it be a small blog or youtube.com is stored on a server somewhere. This server is said to be hosting the web site. Some companies specialize in web hosting, such as GoDaddy or Hostgator and some specialize in hosting just blogs on their servers. These are the companies we discuss below.
Hosted Platforms
1. Blogger – is the oldest blog hosting platform, starting way back in 1999. It is now owned by Google and it hosts millions of blogs, all of them free. When you start a blog on blogger, you choose a name and by default the address of your blog is yourblogname.blogspot.com. You can also transfer a real domain name (as in www.yourblogname.com) to Blogger which does give a more professional feel to a blog.
2. Typepad – is another well established blog hosting platform. It has a free service as well as several different levels of paid service. But if you want to use your own domain name you have to go with one of the paid services. I actually host a couple of my personal blogs at Typepad and have been very happy with their reliability and service.
3. Wordpress – has quickly become one of the most popular blog hosting services in the world with more than 9 million blogs now hosted on Wordpress.com. You can now use your own domain name and pay for premium features such as more storage and the removal of Adsense ads that occasionally appear on Wordpress hosted blogs.
Non-Hosted Platforms
The three companies mentioned above are primarily focused on hosting blogs on their servers. But you don’t have to host your blog on a hosted platform, you can host it at a regular web hosting service that will host blogs as well as normal web sites. There are literally thousands of companies that provide web hosting services and all of these will allow you set up a blog. Non-hosted blogging platforms are really just blog publishing applications that allow you to quickly and easily publish your blog.
1. Wordpress – Now hang on a minute. I just mentioned Wordpress as a hosting platform, what is it doing here again? It really is a bit confusing. Here I am referring to Wordpress.org, whereas above I was referring to Wordpress.com. They are completely different animals. Wordpress.org is the place to download the Wordpress blog publishing platform. You can install this software on any web hosting company you choose. In fact, Wordpress is so popular that many of these companies make it an option to install with just one click. Best of all it is completely free.
2. Others – there are many other blog publishing systems out there such as Joomla, Drupal or Movable Type but Wordpress is quickly becoming the industry standard. There is a huge amount of support for Wordpress, especially all the useful plug-ins, that for a typical small business owner Wordpress will be the easiest solution.
What I Recommend
It all depends on what you want to achieve with your blog as to which blogging platform you should choose. If you just want a vehicle to occasionally communicate with your customers the latest news from your company then one of the hosted platforms would be fine. Although, it is always best to use your own domain name (even if it is just blog.yourdomain.com) rather than yourcompany.typepad.com for example. The latter gives an unprofessional impression.
If you are more serious about blogging and you want to drive more traffic to your web site then I would recommend using Wordpress (the Wordpress.org variety) on a blog attached to your existing site. This way the address can be www.yourdomain.com/blog which for many reasons, that I will discuss in a future post, is the best way to set up your blog to maximize your search engine traffic.
Related Articles
Wordpress vs Joomla vs Drupal – from Good Web Practices
Choosing a Blogging Platform – from Blogging Basics 101
Photo courtesy of John Kannenberg
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