Free WordPress/Blogger Blog or Hosted? Consider This!

[eVentureBiz]

Hello everyone. Anyone who knows me around here knows I author a blog, a WordPress blog to be more specific.

One of the things I see people always looking for is FREE. Everyone wants something for free, even if the normal cost is relatively low. We really need to get past this.

If you're looking to start a blog, you really shouldn't use a free Blogger or WordPress account - go hosted. I understand what it's like if you're low on funds, been there done that. But keep in mind monthly web hosting usually breaks down to about 1 Java Chip latte from Starbucks a month.

That's a cheap price to pay for something so important.

Why You Shouldn't Go Free:

I could list a number of drawbacks to free web hosting, but for blogs, let me just illustrate one example.

Let's say you decide to get a free WordPress blogging account over at WordPress.com and use that until you think you're ready for a real account. Heck, you don't even know if you want to blog or not, so you're just testing it with a free account.

Ok. Point taken. However, most web hosting companies come with a money-back guarantee and many of them you can cancel your hosting account at any time.

So there's no need to worry about being out a lot of money.

Next, and this is the biggest point I'll make, when you decide to transfer over to a real hosting account (i.e. paid), you're going to lose all the momentum you've built for yourself.

Let's say you spend a year writing a bunch of blog posts and manage to attract many links, create a name for yourself, and even managed to get a few articles go viral and linked on Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

Now one day you decide to graduate up to a hosted blog account. Guess what? Not only are you going to have a lot of fun transferring your blog's 100+ blog posts to a new account, you're also starting from square 1 . . . all over again.

I've been blogging for less than a year and have a few search terms which get me to the top of Google. I couldn't imagine transferring to a new domain name. I'd lose all I've built up.

All those links I've spent so much time in getting to point to my site - GONE!

Does a free blogging account still sound good?

[ishkey]

John has a strong point about free vs paid hosting.
Free is ok to try for brief time to see if you like it and stay with it. Say maybe a few weeks.
Look at it this way;
In the naming convention of DNS hierarchy you have (we will use www.someonselsename.com)
Top level name = .com
Second level = someonelsename
Third level = www
You have a real IP address, a location on the web, which is index by the search engines as a top level.

Now look at a free site; will call it (yourblog)
Notice you are not a .com, you are a subdomain and this is your website title; www.yourblog.someonelsename.com

To the search engines you look like this
.com
someonelsename
www
yourblog (4th level)

Search engines are indexing on the top level domain 'someonelsename' their IP address and not you.
If you have been there long enough to get popluar and now you want to move, guess what... You will start all over again. OUCH!
A client of mine just yesterday said to me "Dave I think I may have to move to a new server. What is going to happen to my Ranking?" Just look at his client list http://www.cga2k.com/cga_clients.html that he has developed over the years. At the moment I don't have a complete answer to lesson the impact, but it won't be as bad, as if it was like the example above.

[pezboy45]

As far as I know, if he keeps all of his key words, and description the same, his site should stay in the same spot in google.
(and remind him, changing servers will not affect your domain name).

But, also remind him that transferring servers will put him down for about 12-24 hours.

[eVentureBiz]

Yeah his impact shouldn't be too bad. I haven't actually switched servers on a domain's hosting and noticed its effect on PageRank though.

ishkey, I'm writing an SEO tips article on my blog due out hopefully on Monday. I'm going to link to what you said here. That's a great example you made.

[ishkey]

Yea your right John the effect isn't all that bad going from one paid server to another but your ranking does go down for awhile, clients don't like that. But in away it could be good, like adding new content to a page. What gets me is the 72 hour window that is allowed by ICAN to switch over servers. My intent was elaborate on your comments and to get people to start looking at the whole picture. Our society is into minute moments of I want it now, give me the answer and then it's oh my now what do I do. It's like they need a sugar fix. Quick buzz - short lasting.

Link by all means. You always have something useful to say.