I have read numerous posts lately where blogger and blogspot have been malfunctioning or kicking blog authors to the curb. One blogger said that he was reminded that blogger OWNS you and your blog. This is because these services and others are free. Don’t get me wrong, the word FREE is my favorite word in the English language. But sometimes you get what you pay for! The fact that you have little control over your blog is a scary thing.
For those of you who use free blog sites, I have no clue about your intentions for your blog. What I do know is that if your intentions are semi-serious and you want to build it up and drive a ton of traffic to it, you should probably shy away from the free blog sites. There are always exceptions to the rule, but if you look at the larger and more popular personal financial blogs out there like Free Money Finance, AllFinancialMatters, and Consumerism Commentary to name a few, they do not use these free sites.
The alternative is cheap and VERY simple. Do not criticize me for advertising my web host, but I highly recommend buying Dream Host’s $7.95 per month hosting plan
For $8 per month, you get a huge amount of bandwidth and storage space to fully host your blog, and you get a free domain registration included in the price. And get this, they have a “one-click” install for WordPress. This means that you could literally have wordpress installed on your domain and up and running in a matter of a couple days. This is exaclty how I run my website, and the $84 a year is worth it to me to have complete control over my blog. I strongly urge you to consider it, because it’s not fair for you to be jerked around by a free blogging site.
