When starting your first blog, you need to consider the very best blog hosting platform for you. Your ideas and content won’t come into fruition if you don’t have a blog hosting platform that will help you bring them to life.
Your blog hosting platform of choice, however, depends on your needs and what you want to achieve as a blogger. Each platform offers something different from each other. Also, how comfortable you are with your chosen blog platform also plays a vital role in your decision.
For newbie bloggers, your choice of a blog hosting platform now will dictate the future of your blog. You can change the platform later on but it’s better to choose the right one as early as today to save you time from migrating your blog to a different platform.
In this post, you will learn how to choose the best blog hosting platform you must use for your blog by determining the different factors and choices at play to help you make an informed decision.
To establish the foundation of the article, we need to define what we mean by blog hosting platform.
There is a difference between a blog hosting platform and a blog platform.
The thing about blog platforms
A blog platform refers to sites that let you create an account to set up your blog there. Examples of blogging platforms are WordPress.com, Medium, Tumblr, and others. There are also website builders like Weebly and Wix that use the drag-and-drop builder to help you create beautiful sites with no coding or design experience. You can sign up to these blog platforms for free but you can also upgrade your subscription to enjoy premium features.
With blog platforms, all you need to worry about is creating your content. After signing up for an account, you can customize the look and feel of your blog and publish content right away. You don’t have to concern yourself with the technical details of your blog, making blogging platforms perfect for beginners.
The disadvantage with blog platforms is their limitations. You can only customize your blog as much as the system allows you to. While this wouldn’t be an issue from the start, there’s a chance you may outgrow blogging platforms and look for more versatile platforms that let you tweak your blog from the ground up.
Blog hosting platforms are different, too
A blog hosting platform refers to web hosting services where you can set up and install your chosen blog platform. The blogging platforms above do not require you to set them up with a web host. The ones that work best with web hosting providers are self-hosted blogging platforms like WordPress.org, Drupal, Joomla, and others.
There are different types of web hosting to choose from for your website. For newbie bloggers, shared hosting is the best choice for them right now because it is most affordable. This hosting type lets you set up your blog with other websites in the same server.
The caveat with shared hosting is that you share server resources. If a blog in the shared hosting is attracting the most traffic, most of the resources in the server will work for that blog, leaving your blog with little to work with. However, unless your blog is attracting thousands of views a day, this shouldn’t be an issue right now. Also, you can upgrade your hosting plan to accommodate the needs of your blog.
That said, web hosting requires you to sign up for a monthly or annual subscription. The price of each web host depends on the features available. Once you have chosen your web hosting provider, you still need to install and set up your blog yourself.
So are blogging platforms better than self-hosted ones?
As you can see, there are lots of factors coming into play when choosing a blog hosting platform. You manage the technical side of your blog and not just the writing and promoting of the posts. Beginners might find the process too intimidating and would take the easier route of signing up to sites like Medium and setting up their blog there.
However, the biggest advantage of web hosting platforms is the customization. There’s so much you can do with a self-hosted blog. You can use plugins and add-ons to supercharge your blog and help you increase social shares, subscribers, and traffic, things that aren’t available from website builders and other blog platforms.
In hindsight, blog platforms are easier to use but limits your blog from achieving more. Self-hosted blogs are much trickier to manage but the limit to how much you can achieve with it is endless!
My take on which is the best blog hosting platform
Personally, I highly recommend you as newbie bloggers to set up a self-hosted blog. It’s not as convenient compared to website builders as you need to teach yourself how to install and set up your blog from your hosting’s control panel. However, most web hosting platform provide tons of support on how you can install your blog from their servers. Therefore, getting your self-hosted blog up and running shouldn’t be a problem.
For your self-hosted blog, there are lots of choices for you. I’ve listed a couple above but this post at Website Builder Expert breaks down the most popular platforms. Personally, I suggest that you use WordPress. BloggingTips.com runs on WordPress, and if you like its look and feel, then you’ll definitely enjoy using this platform. There are good reasons over 76 million websites run on WordPress. The ease of use, the available resources to help you build a beautiful site, and the tools you can use to supercharge your blog should convince you to use WordPress over others. Also, WordPress is a very SEO-friendly platform and makes people find your site on search engines much easier.
When choosing your blog hosting, you need to do your research. There are lots of hosting providers in the market and it will be impossible for you to pick one immediately. However, to get you started, choose a provider that offers shared or WordPress hosting. They are cheap and affordable enough to help you set up a blog at minimum costs. Namecheap and SiteGround are web hosting providers that offer these hosting types to great effect. I have used both and have written my take on both tools in this post. Again, my endorsement should not dissuade you from doing your own research.
Over to you
There is no right or wrong answer for choosing your blog platform and web hosting. Ultimately, it depends on what you are most comfortable in and which among them will help you meet your goals faster and more effectively. If you enjoy using Blogger.com for your blog, then more power to you! What’s important is that you feel at home with your chosen blog platform and web hosting. From there, everything else will follow.