Free blog service or total flexiblity

We’ve been looking this week at how to setup a blog. There’s an interesting debate about whether a free blog service (such as blogspot) should be avoided in favour of total flexibility (wordpress.org hosted on your own server). Louis Gray advises people to host your blog on your own server. Louis identifies some of the shortcomings of free blogs. I agree – up to a point. It all depends on what you’re trying to achieve with your blog.

When I created a blog to complain about the new kitchen that I was having problems with, I hoped that either the blog would be a very short term measure because it would get the attention of the company’s senior directors (it was because it did) which I could then leave or delete or – if it didn’t – that I could build a community of fellow customers around it and improve the blog when I had the audience to make it worthwhile. If I’d wanted to do this I could have done and moved my blog to another provider. The only mistake I made was that I didn’t buy my own domain so if I had moved it to another provider, it still would have been .blogspot.com – a minor inconvenience.

So when deciding how to setup your blog, have your aims clear and try to anticipate what you’re going to want in the future whilst remembering that you can always upgrade when required.