Is it bad to have a free blog or should I pay for one?
I am sure at some point you were tempted by an offer of opening a blog or website that was free. Yes, no fees for hosting or bandwidth.
Yeah, I was one of those people, who opened a blog on a free website. It was, fortunately, a personal blog where I just wanted to document small details of my life. This was a great choice since I did not want to have any fixed costs and this platform allowed me almost full access to the code so I could even insert ads of my own if I wanted.
Guess what? While I never expected anyone other than my friends and fans to read it, this blog caught fire. The number of daily visitors ranges from 3,000 to 4,000 even though many of my posts are simply one line with a link to something interesting that I might find.
Then I realized the downsides. As the traffic grew, I blogged more and then I realized that somewhere in the fine print there was a limit on the number of images I could store. Now, it is a big hassle for me to first find a place to host my pictures and then write the blog post. The website is sometimes down and I can do nothing about it. In other words, I get thousands of visitors that I can often get from there to my other blogs but a problem at the website means that I lose them. Eventually, the company went out of business and I lost everything.
So free or paid? If you are even a little bit serious about blogging, get a domain name and pay for hosting. Free services are not reliable, companies can go out of business, and you may not be able to transfer your blog to another service (the process if often cumbersome, you can lose your pages in the search engine index and their ranking, and sometimes you lose almost all your traffic when your URL changes).
