Hosted Blogs: Living with Limitations

Before you sign up for a hosted blog, make sure you understand the tradeoff(s) that come with using a hosted blog service.  Firstly, and most importantly, you DO NOT control your own blog.  If, for any reason, the company you are using goes out of business or stops operations, gets bought out by a bigger company, has its servers go down for maintenance or a DDoS attack, or even if they just want to change what they offer, you are pretty much stuck with whatever happens next.

/READ MORE// Beginners Guide to Facebook, Part Six: Enjoy It.

If you use a free hosted solution, the service may suddenly decide it wants to start charging money.  Or, if it does charge, it may want to raise it's rates.

Most hosted solutions let users make modifications and changes, but they are often limited.  Usually, they will prevent you from installing plug-ins or add-ons.  In many cases, the amount of actual customization you can do is very limited.  Using a hosted blog service, the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) ethos is a catch-22: sometimes you can't do more with less, you just have to do less.

If you blog for business, as a business, or for your company, you should generally discount a hosted blog solution from your options for a couple of reasons:  Firstly, your blog will likely need to be a part of your company's website, which may or may not exist, and integrate well with the look, feel, and design of that website.  Hosted blogs won't offer the level of customization or integration you will need.  Then there are privacy and security concerns:  control of your blog data is important.  Putting the blog (and website) on your own server will get rid of any doubts about security or data ownership.

for more templates, design ideas and tricks 

follow us on Facebook and Twitter