Are you wanting to take that leap to start blogging for business? Are you have difficulty with the all important decision of choosing to go with a blog hosted (some with monthly fees and many free options) or self-hosted (installed on your web server) blog solution?

Advantages of Hosted Solutions

In short, it’s the easy, quick and cheaper route.

You go to Blogger.com (free), Typepad (monthly fee) or Wordpress.com (free) and fill out an online form. Within 5 minutes you can be blogging. The hardest part is probably coming up with the name for your blog. You use one of their themed templates for the look and feel of your site. You don’t have to worry about the technical aspects like installing software, installing a database, maintaining the database, keeping up with version controls of the software, updating to new & improved versions of the blog software, or worry about security. It’s an all-in-one package.

Disadvantages of Hosted Solutions

In one word - “limitations.”

Do you want to control how you brand your business? Questions to ask yourself:

• Why promote someone else’s business (i.e. myblogname.blogger.com; myblogname.wordpress.com; myblogname.typepad.com)? Host the blog on your server and choose either to use the blog publishing platform (we recommend Wordpress.org) to:

  … manage your current website (mysite.com)
  … host a separate blog domain/site (mycompanysblog.com)
  … place your business blog in a subdirectory of your current website (mysite.com/blog)

• If any part of your marketing relies on some form of search engine optimization, remember when your blog is through a hosted solution you might not be able to control your domain name (myblogname.blogger.com).
   
• When it comes to the look & feel of your business and your marketing materials, shouldn’t they be consistent? You probably can’t find a theme or blog template on a hosted solution that really match the design of your current website and other marketing materials. Since my motto is to “harness the power of design to communicate the benefits of your products/services”, I recommend a self hosted blog solution which allows you to customize your blog.

  Need a portfolio site?
  Check out Eric-Powell.com’s site using Wordpress.

  Does your site look like a magazine or news site?
  Check out XXLmag.com’s site using Wordpress.

  Want your blog within your existing website (which bring your visitors within your main site)? Check out 37signal’s Signals vs Noise blog

When a hosted solution is conducting maintenance, will people be able to visit your blog? With a hosted solution, your blog is on a shared server. With so many other bloggers on the same server, your blog can experience downtime and visitors to your blog might experience slow downloads. Drawbacks to also consider when you want to upload, edit and manage your blog posts.

There might also be bigger marketing and technical headaches when you do decide to upgrade from a hosted to a self hosted solution.