A Free Hosting or A Paid One for Your Money Making Blog?

You have surfed everywhere. A lot of good websites have caught your attention. You read many blog entries. You might have even joined their community, or subscribed to their RSS subscriptions.

Later, you finally think that everyone has a blog, becoming a blogger seems very cool for you, so now you have decided to also have a blog on your own. And then, you might have signed up for your own free account. You might pick up either a Blogger account, or a WordPress account, or any other free blog providers for a practicing start.

Perhaps, you have posted some random thoughts inside your blog, you might be blogging about your own life, your hobbies, etc. But later, as you learned about blogging, visited some blogs here and there, you finally noticed similar things about those cool blogs / websites: they have displayed advertisements in their pages.

Finally you understood that you could have made profit from blogging by displaying ads inside your own blog. And later, you decided that you wanted that one too, in your current blog or in your new one.

Now, you might have picked up one of these two most favorite blog providers: Blogger or WordPress. You want to display your own advertisement. But how to do that?

Adding advertisement into your Blogger account won’t be a problem, Blogger has some features that allow you to put any advertisement or widget script codes in a special block. Just copy paste of the codes provided by the advertisers (either Google Adsense, Chitika, Obeus, Text Link Ads, Adbrite, or the others) into the special block, then by few clicks and drags to modify the layout of your blog, it’s done.

Blogger even has the feature to add Google Adsense directly from the layout setting page, you can even sign up for your Google Adsense account from the sign up wizard, if you haven’t had your own Adsense account. You would only have to wait the approval from the Google team, if you wanted to become their publisher. Once you have been approved, some layout setting wizard within your Blogger dashboard will help you very much. And there you go, with your Blogger account displaying your own paying advertisement.

However, for those who use wordpress.com as their current blog basis, wordpress.com doesn’t allow the free members to put any advertisement in their blogs, so if you have blogged using WordPress.com free account, and you still want to use WordPress as your blogging engine, then you have to download the engine from wordpress.org and to host it somewhere else that allows you to put your own advertisement. You might have also found any hosting company that supported fantastico installer for WordPress engine, so you would no longer need to upload the WordPress engine on your own to the server.

Okay, so you want to start make money by displaying the advertisements. And for some of you who have been using Blogger accounts, you might have realized that you couldn’t really grab the total control over your templates, your contents, the archiving and the most thing is … your backup-restore control in case unwanted thing would happen to your content or account. You might have been interested in other blog engine like WordPress, but you still have to host it somewhere else that allows any advertisement inside your page.

And these things finally come into your mind: you need another host for your own blog to display ads, and for a start, should it be a free hosting or a paid one?

Well, there are some things to reconsider if you want to start from any free hosting account:

• Read the free hosting terms of service: Do they place ads on the members’ sites?
  

  If they don’t, then where does their earning come from? They still need something to cover the costs for running those free services for you, right? If they do place ads on the members’ sites, you have to find out whether your own affiliate program advertisers will allow you to place their advertisements into such kind of account. Just think about it, if you are an advertiser, will you allow your publisher to display your competitor’s advertisement inside the same website too?

• Read the testimonial of the members.

  Do some research on your own, whether by searching the information from the forums, other websites, search engines, find out how the members have experienced so far with the free hosting company. Are they satisfied? Or are they complaining?

• Read the free hosting company’s FAQ and offers.
  

  How good the features they are offering? How big the space they are offering? How about the database? How about the bandwidth limit?
  Never put your hope too much to any free hosting company that offers you unlimited blah-blah account, for example unlimited bandwidth, because this sounds too good to be true. Even when any paid hosting company dares to offer you this too-good-to-be-true offering, the case of your site being down will mostly happen. You would only get disappointed later.

• How long has the company been running?
  

  This is another thing for you to consider about using any free hosting services. Is the hosting company reliable? Or will they just disappear once they no longer can cover the costs? Many hosting companies back then had offered us free hosting account, but later they suddenly disappeared without notice, or started sending us notice that they would no longer run free services for us and that we would have to upgrade our account into premium one (which means that we would have to pay from that moment on, of course), in order to continue using their services.

So these are some basic things you should think about when you have finally decided to have your own money making blog. I would suggest you to start from a paid hosting account. There are a lot of hosting company that offer you affordable hosting packages for a start. You can later upgrade as your website / blog grows bigger and when you have also found that the company is reliable for you.

And one thing we all might have known about paid hosting company: since we have paid them for using their services, they won’t place advertisement on our pages. And know this, the advertisers will be glad that their ads won’t have competitors in our websites.

So, you are the one who decides.