Over 120,000 new blogs are started each day, and the lion’s share of them will use the WordPress platform. If you’ve made the decision to join the blogosphere, chances are you’re looking at, or already using WordPress.

After you’ve decided which blog software to use, the next step is to decide how and where your blog will be hosted. For WordPress, there’s two options. The first is to host your blog for free on wordpress.com, and the other is to self-host on a provider of your choice by using the free WordPress software that’s available for download from wordpress.org (and is also available to install with a few clicks through Fantastico… an installer within cPanel, which is the control panel we use).

Hosting on wordpress.com

Hosting on wordpress.com is very inexpensive (free), and you can get your blog up and running very quickly… fill out a form to create an account, choose a theme, and then start typing out your posts.

This is a great way to get started, with no investment but I wouldn’t recommend it for anything other than a personal blog that you don’t intend to develop into a source of income.

First, flexibility is lacking. You’ll find a good selection of features with a wordpress.com hosted blog, but you have to take it as it is. You’re very limited in the way you can customize your blog in terms of adding plugins, custom themes, and so on.

Second, if you intend to advertise on your blog, you’ll need to add special code, so before proceeding with the wordpress.com option, do check to see whether you can add the code you want… where you want.

Third, wordpress.com provides you with a subdomain of wordpress.com so your blog’s address will be yourname.wordpress.com.

As you might imagine, with 120,000 new blogs per day, and many of them being set up on the free services your pickings for a name will be pretty slim.  In fact there’s nearly 5,000,000 blogs hosted on wordpress.com already.  

You can of course register your own domain and point it to your wordpress.com hosted blog, but If you do that then your blog will be on a different domain than your website and you’ll lose all the SEO benefit of having a blog on your website.

By far the best way to set up your blog is to actually make it part of your website, which you can only do with a self-hosted solution (unless you’re willing to forego things like POP accounts, MySQL databases, etc.)

Self-Hosted WordPress Blogs

This is absolutely the best way to do it. It’s not free… but you do get what you pay for. By self-hosting your WordPress blog you have complete control over look and feel, the plugins you install, and you can customize the blog in any way you might imagine.

I strongly recommend ditching the themes that are available for WordPress, and actually incorporating your blog into your website with a look and feel that matches (just as we’ve done with our blog).

The reason for this is you get a great deal of SEO benefit from a blog, and if your blog is part of your website then your entire website will be crawled and indexed by the search engines more frequently. Human visitors are also more likely to explore a site they’re already on than to click through from a blog they’re reading in order to get to your external website.

Hosting WordPress on your own hosting account makes it possible to add a blog to your website as opposed to having a website… and a blog on two separate sites.

This type of customization can be done on any self-hosted WordPress installation, on any paid web hosting service.

Of course, this requires some theme modification to match look and feel, which can be daunting to non-programmers. This is why we offer the service for free to our customers who use WordPress.

At TheWebHostCompany.com We will install WordPress, install the customer’s chosen theme and plugins, and at their option we will modify the appearance of the blog to match the appearance of their website and actually integrate it for them. We’ll also move an existing blog. We do this for free for our customers, they simply open a hosting account and submit a support ticket to request the work.

Either a wordpress.com free hosted blog, or a self-hosted WordPress installation will provide you with a great deal of benefit. What’s best for you depends on how much control you need to have over look and feel, and functionality.

If a free solution will meet your current needs, do acknowledge that those needs may change and make preparations… register a domain name. A blog can be moved, but a subdomain cannot.  Having your own domain name will ensure that any effort made to promote yourname.wordpress.com will not be wasted since you can take yourname.com with you wherever you go.