Best site for hosting a blog?

[notyoueither]

I know nothing about blogging, except that I read several blogs.

I think there are several different sites that host blogs. I'm asking Poly which is the best? What are the pros and cons of each?

[snoopy369]

What kind of blog? What features do you care about - in particular do you care a lot about comments or do you mostly just want to put stuff out there and not really care about what idiots who read it think? Do you know HTML at all/want to do any customizing that way or prefer to just take a standard theme and write words to it?

In general, Wordpress is probably the 'standard' blogging destination; it gives you a decent amount of customization without knowing HTML/etc. (ie without doing any work beyond selecting a few radio buttons). It has decent commenting, etc.

[notyoueither]

A blog about The Most Important Issue in the Universe! What else leads someone to obsessively self-publish?

Comments would be fine. I've never done much with HTML, but might once I start caring how the page looks and works.

[Wezil]

A blog about The Most Important Issue in the Universe!

I googled it but found the results unsatisfactory.

[notyoueither]

Google should alter their search algorithms then, obviously.

[Wezil]

Apparently. That would seem an important topic.

[Alexander's Horse]

I blog sort of blog here, which is a shame because I should be world famous.

[SlowwHand]

Why would you think you're not? You're known is the USA, Philippines, England, Russia and countless other countries.

[Alexander's Horse]

there are many topics we could take to the world - which is the best MBT, will Mr Fun actually ever be fun...

[Aeson]

Do you want to have your own domain? Or just use one of the subdomain blogs on web 2.0 sites like wordpress or blogger?

If you're going to get your own domain, you can probably get it for $2 or so for a year. Just search for "domain registration" on Google. Registrars usually run special promos in their Google ads. Stay away from NetworkSolutions and Register.com as they really up the price the second year and make it as difficult as they can for you to cancel or move the domain. Namecheap, GoDaddy, 1&1, Yahoo, and Google are all good places to register domains.

For hosting a personal blog, can't beat HawkHost's lowest plan. Comes in at $20 for the first year using their half off coupon if you pay for the full year, and they have better servers than any of the other cheap hosting places I've tried.

[Aeson]

And go with Wordpress if self-hosting.

[benren]

there's loads of different blog styles. i guess it just depends how professional you want it and what you want it for. like ... if you want it for photos or archiving posts. plus, if it's professional and you want to share it publically then you probably want your own domain name. aeson is right, you can get pretty cheap domain names now. i used these guys and would recommend them. managed hosting is good too, but it jsut depends on how complicated you want your site to be and how many features. probably not worth it if your savvy with coding or know someone who is.