What sets many blogs apart right from the start is choosing a free host or a payed host. If you don’t know what you have to do to buy  hosting and what comes after that, the freehost can be a very enticing offer as it offers everything in a very simple to use interface.

And althought sites like Blogger have had major success in getting millions of blogs up on the web, it must be said that the problem with these is that they still “belong” to blogger. Technically everything you put on your free host usually belongs to them.

Some may say to start on a freehost and when you have a big enough userbase to cover hosting costs to switch over to a payed host. While this seems like a great idea in theory, it’s not at all effective. Besides users who have bookmarked your pages, one of your biggest providers of readers is Google. Now we don’t know exactly how Google Search functions, but it seems to be biased against all the free blogs. Long story short, if you have your own host your pages will be more likely to be indexed in Google because it sees you as a “real” site and not just a “blogger-blogspot site.”Blogger, like all free hosts, have attracted a lot of spam blogs which have caused a lot of search engines (including Google) to filter out most of them. If you neglect a payed host until you have enough of a userbase to pay for one, your blog will most likely never get off the ground. Now don’t get me wrong there are a few successful free-hosted blogs on Technorati, but the majority go down the pipes.

Another reason would be having to port over all your posts. While many hosts/tools have tried to make this a seamless transition, it is far from perfect. File formats may vary causing incompatible transfers, pages might become corrupt due to different version of Apache running. It leads to unnecessary hassle that could have been avoided.

In addition, you might lose some of your established user-base by switching sites. Although posting a link saying your blog has moved seems practical, it has stopped a lot of every-day readers from coming over during my previous blogs.

By using a payed host you’ll be losing a bit of money at first compared to using a freehost, however it is more beneficial in the long term because:

1. Google indexes your site “more” which leads to more readers
2. Adds a sense of professionalism
3. No hassles of transferring over later

Your user number is increased by having your own host due to Google indexing, which leads to increased revenues through ads, which leads to paying off the hosting costs. It’s much quicker because with free hosting you don’t have the exponential increase in users through Google indexing which leads to relatively slow revenue increases.

While it may scare those new to blogging to have to dish out 2 years up-front in cash to get the best hosting cost, you have to realize that 2 years is more than enough to make that back. It’s only about $6.00 a month which is easily do-able, and as your user-base expands you’ll be making a lot more.